Land degradation through loss of ground cover, wind erosion and woody scrub encroachment affects rangelandsglobally, threatening the resilience of communities and ecosystems. Climate change is anticipated to exacerbateland degradation in the rangelands, through increased incidence of drought. In the semi-arid rangelands ofAustralia, land managers have limited capacity to manage land degradation. Recent Australian climate policyinitiatives could provide opportunities to improve land management, and increase resilience of rangelandpastoral systems. The Australian government’s Emissions Reduction Fund enables landholders to obtain carboncredits for sequestering carbon in vegetation and soil. In western New South Wales (NSW), landholders havereceived funding for avoiding clearing or allowing the regrowth of native vegetation. These carbon farmingprojects could provide financial resources for landholders to manage drivers of land degradation and thuscontribute to achieving “land degradation neutrality” (LDN). However, the impacts of carbon farming, parti-cularly at regional level, are highly uncertain.

The conceptual framework for LDN proposes that planning for LDN should be underpinned by assessment ofresilience of the current and alternative lands use, using tools such as the Resilience Adaptation Pathways andTransformation Approach (RAPTA). RAPTA is a framework developed to guide the application of resilienceconcepts in management of social-ecological systems. It encourages a systems approach to identify critical lin-kages in the system, that become the focus of assessment of the system’s resilience, and development of man-agement plans to enhance resilience, and facilitate transformation where required.We present a case study of the application of RAPTA to support assessment of the resilience of currentmanagement and alternative land use strategies involving carbon farming. RAPTA facilitated a holistic assess-ment of social, biophysical and economic impacts of carbon farming in western NSW, that improved under-standing of the opportunities, trade-offs, synergies and risks. RAPTA was found to be an effective tool to supportLDN planning. Constraints to application of RAPTA include gaps in knowledge of thresholds, and resource re-quirements to enable effective stakeholder engagement, to inform integrated landscape management.