2010-10-01
A PROJECT to “farm carbon”, a 21st-century enterprise sparked by climate change, is being mooted as a possible alternative to gas mining in the Karoo.
News of the project emerged at a fiery meeting in Pearston last week, hosted by the gas exploration company Bundu, which saw hot dispute among farmers, government representatives and Bundu officials on the environmental and social merits of exploring and possibly drilling for gas.
One of the people attending the meeting was Rhodes University ecologist Mike Powell, who has been involved in the pioneer sub-tropical thicket restoration programme in the Baviaanskloof, funded by the Department of Water Affairs.
Based on research done at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and the University of Stellenbosch, the Baviaanskloof programme showed spekboom, the dominant plant in the Eastern Cape’s indigenous succulent thicket, stores huge loads of carbon. Its carbon sequestration ability is comparable to rainforests – Earth’s best carbon sequestrators.
The NMMU research team found this ability relates to the species’s intensive branching, and the deep piles of leaf litter which accumulate beneath it. It was recognised that if spekboom was replanted in spots it used to occur, which are now degraded and eroded, usually due to overgrazing by goats and sheep, this could result in multiple positive effects.
The benefits would range from restoring biodiversity to sequestrating carbon – and combating climate change as a result. It would also give hard- pressed landowners an “alternative crop” to sell as carbon credits on the international carbon market.
Furthermore, as the Baviaanskloof project has shown, spekboom planting also means lots of jobs, because it is very labour intensive.
Powell told The Herald Pearston seemed to have the two key credentials for a successful carbon farming project: historically occurring spekboom around the local koppies, now destroyed in large tracts, and plenty of unemployed people.
However, careful initial feasibility studies would need to be done, he said.
Funds were needed to cover this assessment and, if the project progressed, to cover salaries for the big teams of people who would be needed to plant the truncheons of spekboom, he explained. About 50 or 60 people are used to re-vegetate an area of 1000ha, over a period of about two years.
If a landowner has the “financial fortitude” in terms of the capital available and long-term commitment to the project, he can become an investment partner, and then reap directly the dividends got from carbon trading. Another way is to rent the land for carbon farming to the investor, meaning a much quicker although lesser cash-flow benefit.
Since rolling out the thicket restoration programme in Baviaanskloof, the Department of Water Affairs has helped expand it to the Addo Elephant National Park and the Great Fish Nature Reserve.
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