This report forms part of a study of the impacts of climate change on the Monsoonal North Natural Resource Management Region of Australia. It focusses on carbon sequestration and emissions abatement using the savanna fire methodology under the Emissions Reduction Fund and Carbon Farming Initiative. 

The savanna fire methodology is based on the use of early dry season controlled burning to reduce overall fire frequency and fuel consumption and thereby reduce emissions and potentially increase carbon sequestration. Under likely climate change scenarios, the opportunity to use careful fire management in the early dry season will continue. 

For the monsoonal north, changes in rainfall seasonality are potentially of great significance to carbon dynamics. There is evidence of increasing dry season length in North Queensland and decreasing length in the south Kimberley region of Western Australia. Unfortunately, current climate models cannot robustly model the isolated storm events that determine the transitions between the dry and wet seasons and thus the length of the dry season. Therefore we produced a range of scenarios of possible changes in seasonality and modelled their effects on vegetation and carbon stocks.