The Business Council of Australia (BCA) welcomes the opportunity to provide comment on the Climate Change Authority’s (CCA) Issues Paper: Enhancing the ACCU Scheme to support Australia’s 2035 emissions reduction target. We also welcome this early initiation of the consultation process for the CCA’s upcoming review of the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011, which enables the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme.
Among the most important challenges and opportunities facing our nation is facilitating an orderly domestic transition to net zero — one that best serves our economy and our community. How we transition will have a strong bearing not only on our emissions levels, but on our productivity growth, our competitiveness as a nation and our living standards over the longer term.
A recently released BCA report, Australia 2035 – Maximising Our Potential, analysed three emission-reduction scenarios from 2025 to 2035 that ratchet in ambition based on technology deployment and adoption rates and changes in economic activity. The analysis was undertaken across seven sectors: electricity and energy, resources, industry, transport, agriculture, buildings and land sector.
A key finding of our work is that Australia can’t continue to rely on the land sector to do the heavy lifting and that simply maintaining the size of Australia’s existing carbon sink requires significant additional abatement effort — in the order of a 27 Mt increase per year by 2035. Increasing direct (own site) emission reductions from the other sectors of the economy is crucial to meeting Australia’s emission reduction goals, and robust credit creation from Australia’s carbon sink is critical to supporting hard to abate subsectors as they invest in own site emission reductions overtime.
As our submission outlines, the efficiency and effectiveness of the ACCU scheme is clearly foundational to maximising the potential of Australia’s land sector (and other forms of removals and avoided emissions) to contribute to the achievement of Australia’s emission reduction goals.