Killing feral camels to reduce the amount of methane they emit into the atmosphere provides an exciting opportunity to tackle global warming, the federal climate change department says.
Private company Northwest Carbon has put forward a proposal that could result in farmers and others paid for culling camels on their land and selling offsets under the federal government's carbon farming initiative (CFI).
Department official Shayleen Thompson points out that the idea of generating credits by reducing emissions from feral animals has been around for a while.
But Northwest has developed a methodology for determining the extent of the reduction.
"Camels like cattle do in fact produce methane as part of their digestive processes," Ms Thompson told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday.
"The idea is that one can take action to reduce camel populations off a set baseline and hence create carbon credits as a result of that activity which does benefit the atmosphere."
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
"So it does offer the opportunity for some quite exciting abatement including in areas like the Northern Territory where people are very interested in finding opportunities to reduce emissions and create new revenue streams using the mechanism of the CFI," the department's land division head said.
Any reduction in emissions resulting from a camel cull wouldn't count towards Australia's Kyoto targets.
Northwest notes that its approach to determining the emissions reduction benefit from killing camels is "completely novel".
It says the reduction would be based on "the difference between the estimated age of the animal at removal and the predicted average age of natural mortality".
Camels would be shot from helicopters or four-wheel drives.
Alternatively, they could be mustered and killed on site or taken to an abattoir.
An additional benefit would be that less vegetation was trampled - enabling more carbon to be stored in the land.
If no additional action is taken to curb the feral camel population it's estimated their greenhouse gas emissions will exceed 1.9 million tonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide per annum by 2020.
By that time there would be two million camels roaming Australia's rangelands.
The government's domestic offsets integrity committee has provided Northwest Carbon with feedback and it's now up to the company to finalise their methodology.
AA
Front page
RSS Feed