Table 2 Implementation challenges for Northern Australia's savanna burning emissions abatement methodologies in East and Southern African savanna-protected areas. This information was extracted from the review evidence-base and criteria adapted from Russell-Smith et al. (2017), Nieman et al. (2021), and da Veiga and Nikolakis (2022)
Criteria for savanna burning projects | Implementation challenge |
|---|---|
Enabling policy and legislation | ▪ Institutional resistance towards including savanna burning as a mitigation strategy in Nationally Determined Contributions ▪ Negative perceptions towards traditional fire use and lack of policy support for local participation in decision-making ▪ No supporting policies and carbon abatement contracts to safeguard local distribution and access to carbon benefits ▪ No legal requirements to include social-cultural aspirations and non-ecological goals in fire management |
Kyoto Protocol-compliant Methodologies | ▪ Spatiotemporal discordance between aerial-based Kyoto Protocol compliant methodologies and walking-based adaptive local burning practices ▪ Requirement for secure land tenure and legal access to manage savanna burning projects for ≥ 7 years ▪ Historical dominance of mid-dry season and future wet season burning overlooked by determination of fire seasons as early- and late-dry |
Evidence and baseline data | ▪ No formal guidelines to determine appropriate pre-project emissions baseline ▪ Lack of long-term scientific evidence and monitoring for robust baseline data underpinning project development (e.g., fire mapping, fuel accumulation, combustion efficiency, site emissions factors, bio-sequestration, and biodiversity responses) |
Emissions reductions objectives | ▪ Reporting and funding conditions contingent on annual fire performance (burned area and seasonality) rather than multiple fire and ecological dynamics ▪ No accounting for the effects of inter- and intra-annual biogeophysical variability on fire type, occurrence, and associated emissions ▪ No temporal correlation between weather and seasonal cut-off dates for emissions in semi-arid savannas ▪ Increase in CH4 emissions factors associated with combustion of uncured fuels in early-dry season burning ▪ Uncertain relationship between N2O emissions factors and combustion efficiency and fuel type |
Conservation of carbon stocks objectives | ▪ Uncertain relationship between fire and grazing on future carbon sequestration potential of grass and woody species ▪ Misapplication of voluntary carbon market mechanisms that define forests as having 10–30% woody cover ▪ Expansion of unpalatable and fire-resistant increaser II and invader species not included as applicable vegetation types in savanna burning ▪ Increased long-term wildfire risk and associated emissions ▪ Permanency obligation challenges (i.e., maintaining carbon offsets for 25 or 100 years) in bio-sequestration projects in protected areas |
Equity and rights of local people | ▪ Limited application of FPIC and income diversification opportunities due to the absence of local property rights in protected areas ▪ Commodification of traditional burning practices in state-mandated indigenous ranger programs to meet donor demands and market objectives ▪ Acceleration of power inequities between carbon credit purchasing and producing countries through “accumulation by decarbonisation” ▪ Revocation of dry season grazing and resource harvesting rights due to competition with savanna burning for fuel biomass |
Co-benefits | ▪ Limited assignment of monetary values to additional direct and off-site ecosystem services due to stakeholder diversity and variation in purchasing power ▪ “Bio-perverse” outcomes due to implementation of low-cost extensive burns to maximize annual carbon revenue rather than fine-scale patch-mosaic burning ▪ No legislation and allied market incentives to develop an adaptive biodiversity monitoring framework and incorporate biodiversity credits into savanna burning ▪ Wildlife conservation trade-offs due to herbivore-fire competition for grass biomass and prevention of intense fires necessary to prevent woody thickening |
Capacity | ▪ Limited community capacity to address conflicting land-use objectives and fire management due to weak local governance ▪ Requirement for international support and sustained national political will-power to develop and scale-up projects ▪ Limited public support and transparent financial systems for the establishment of taxpayer-funded Emissions Reduction Fund (equiv.) for fire management ▪ Requirement for large attitudinal change of public and private investors to realize sustainability of carbon revenue over short-term development aid |