Can Australian plantation forest carbon offset methods increase carbon storage and timber supply? A case study from the Green Triangle plantation forestry region in Australia.

The plantation forestry estate in Australia has been in decline for a decade or more. Previous studies attribute observed investment inertia to factors including the long-term nature of forestry investments, high up front establishment cost and more recently water resource constraints. The introduction of plantation forestry methods as part of the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme in 2017 has generated renewed interest in plantation forestry as a carbon abatement option.

Current carbon prices do not stack up to much land use change, despite bundled ecosystem service co-benefits.

Biological sources of carbon sequestration such as revegetation have been highlighted as important avenues to combat climate change and meet global targets by the global community including the Paris Climate Agreement. However, current and projected carbon prices present a considerable barrier to broad-scale adoption of tree planting as a key mitigation strategy. One avenue to provide additional economic and environmental incentives to encourage wider adoption of revegetation is the bundling or stacking of additional co-beneficial ecosystem services that can be realized from tree planting.

China's response to a national land-system sustainability emergency.

China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.

Climate change and the economics of biomass energy feedstocks in semi-arid agricultural landscapes: A spatially explicit real options analysis.

The economics of establishing perennial species as renewable energy feedstocks has been widely investigated as a climate change adapted diversification option for landholders, primarily using net present value (NPV) analysis. NPV does not account for key uncertainties likely to influence relevant landholder decision making. While real options analysis (ROA) is an alternative method that accounts for the uncertainty over future conditions and the large upfront irreversible investment involved in establishing perennials, there have been limited applications of ROA to evaluating land use change decision economics and even fewer applications considering climate change risks.

Real options analysis for land use management: Methods, application, and implications for policy.

Discounted cash flow analysis, including net present value is an established way to value land use and management investments which accounts for the time-value of money. However, it provides a static view and assumes passive commitment to an investment strategy when real world land use and management investment decisions are characterised by uncertainty, irreversibility, change, and adaptation. Real options analysis has been proposed as a better valuation method under uncertainty and where the opportunity exists to delay investment decisions, pending more information.

Land use efficiency: anticipating future demand for land-sector greenhouse gas emissions abatement and managing trade-offs with agriculture, water, and biodiversity.

Competition for land is increasing, and policy needs to ensure the efficient supply of multiple ecosystem services from land systems. We modelled the spatially explicit potential future supply of ecosystem services in Australia's intensive agricultural land in response to carbon markets under four global outlooks from 2013 to 2050. We assessed the productive efficiency of greenhouse gas emissions abatement, agricultural production, water resources, and biodiversity services and compared these to production possibility frontiers (PPFs).

Ecosystem services in urban water investment.

Increasingly, water agencies and utilities have an obligation to consider the broad environmental impacts associated with investments. To aid in understanding water cycle interdependencies when making urban water supply investment decisions, an ecosystem services typology was augmented with the concept of integrated water resources management. This framework is applied to stormwater harvesting in a case study catchment in Adelaide, South Australia.