This report reviews some of the potential landscape changes that carbon farming may bring to eastern Australia, focusing on six natural resource management regions. Three are Queensland NRM bodies (Fitzroy Basin Association, Burnett Mary Regional Group and South-east Queensland Catchments) and three are Local Land Service regions in New South Wales (North Coast, Hunter and Greater Sydney).

Carbon farming in Australia revolves around the Carbon Farming Initiative/Emissions Reduction Fund (CFI/ERF) regulatory framework administered by the Commonwealth Government. There are also several international ‘voluntary’ markets.

In this report we provide an economic analysis which aims to estimate the order of magnitude of carbon farming activity that may potentially occur and to identify where, at regional scale, the most prospective locations for the various carbon farming activities may be assessed.

Particular attention is given to vegetation based activities, such as reforestation using regrowth or plantings, because they are relatively high profile “headline” activities that may cause landscape-scale changes in natural resources and their management in eastern Australia.

We also review the potential co-benefits and dis-benefits to ecosystem function likely to occur through landscape-scale vegetation change, brought about by vegetation-based carbon farming.

Spatial data are provided additionally for the price to break even for planting and regrowth carbon farming activities, for 100 year permanence over a 25 year commitment period, as well as the re-vegetation benefit metric, as outlined in the report.