The NICC Opportunities Roadmap: a decision-support framework to assess indigenous climate change opportunities in Australia

[摘要] This report presents the NICC Opportunities Roadmap—a decision-making framework that has been designed to help Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators to develop a carbon project by undertaking a step-wise process and identifying more detailed decision-support tools. In July 2012, a mandatory carbon market came into effect in Australia. Australia’s carbon offset scheme—the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI)—is designed to enable land managers to participate in this market. Engagement in voluntary carbon markets also exists in Australia, in which buyers choose to offset their emissions for reasons of social responsibility or for product marketing by generating and selling carbon credits. Although Indigenous co-benefits—benefits to local Indigenous communities that are delivered along with a reduction in carbon emissions as part of carbon offset projects—have been incorporated as a voluntary component of the CFI, there are a number of obstacles to realising Indigenous participation and co-benefits in CFI or indeed voluntary carbon markets. The NICC Opportunities Roadmap is designed to enable Indigenous communities and their collaborators to identify and evaluate carbon mitigation opportunities that are available to them, and to determine which opportunities to pursue.The NICC Opportunities Roadmap outlines five key steps (illustrated in the figure below) that Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators can follow in order to determine whether potential carbon projects are desirable and feasible. By following these steps, collaborators can assess the level of community interest in a carbon project, establish local community objectives, identify tangible and intangible local assets, identify the benefits and opportunity pathways associated with these assets, and identify any constraints or risks associated with pursuing these opportunity pathways. The roadmap can be used to ensure that, throughout this process, local community discussion is guided by available knowledge about carbon mitigation opportunities that may be available in Australia (cf. LWEC 2011, 3). At the end of the process, local Indigenous communities and their collaborators should be able to critically consider potential carbon projects, evaluate the range of benefits or opportunities that may be achieved through these carbon projects, and identify the best and most culturally appropriate way to generate carbon credits that produce cultural, health, social, conservation, and amenity benefits for Indigenous peoples.This roadmap is part of the National Indigenous Climate Change (NICC) Project—a coordinated forum of Indigenous and non-Indigenous representatives from around Australia including the corporate sector, academia, other professions, and experts who are researching and raising awareness within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and the corporate sector about the mutual opportunities and risks associated with emerging carbon markets. The research project and the NICC Opportunities Roadmap have been informed by discussions, surveys, meetings, and consultations with various experts and representatives from Indigenous communities, representative bodies, and corporations; Corporate Australia; and various government agencies and bodies. One of the key principles behind the NICC Opportunities Roadmap is that strategies for mitigation must be holistic and must take into account the range of ecological, social, human rights, and cultural dimensions of climate change impacts and responses. The roadmap is also based on the NICC’s recognition that a mosaic of different social benefits and investment prospects are available to local Indigenous communities across Australia. This mosaic is caused by unique and diverse social, cultural, and economic attributes that exist within and across Indigenous communities and country, the range in different legal land tenure interests, and the range of institutional support provided in different states and

[发布日期] 2013-11-03 [发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)