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Carbon farming has been around for more than a decade and yet few projects have been established in the wet tropics of north Queensland. Negative attitudes of some restoration practitioners to carbon farming as a restoration approach have impeded progress, resulting in an overwhelming focus on 'instant rainforests' utilising dense plantings of rainforest trees and excessive costs of restoration, way above costs of revegetation elsewhere in Australia. Carbon farming has often been cast as 'plantation forestry' with few biodiversity benefits. I argue that carbon farming can deliver enormous benefits in achieving restoration objectives, including biodiversity goals. Monetary value to landholders, lower establishment costs, ease of planting methods, and biodiversity benefits are demonstrated by the evidence. The pace of forest clearing in the region outstrips reforestation by at least 100 times, so we need every tool in the restoration box.

Brief Bio
Noel Preece PhD is an Adjunct Associate Professor with TESS. He has published more than 200 technical reports, scientific articles, books, and book chapters. He has worked as an environmental consultant since 1990 and was with the NSW National Park and Wildlife Serfice and the NT Conservation Commission before then. In 2009 with his wife Penny van Oosterzee, they established the Thiaki Rainforest Reforestation Project for Cost-Effective Carbon and Biodiversity on their property in the Atherton Tablelands, inland from Cairns. The project is also a large-scale research project covering 30 ha with 90+ research plots and 5 concurrent experiments, resulting in more than 20 research publications to date.