Last year, Australia joined the rest of the world by committing to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.

To reach this goal we need to rapidly and drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Yet Australia’s fossil fuel emissions continue to rise and we lack a robust, credible long-term plan to cut Australia’s emissions consistent with our commitments. While rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions is essential for meeting the climate change challenge, storing carbon in land can make a useful, though secondary, contribution.

This report describes the carbon cycle and how moving carbon from the atmosphere back to the land by planting trees or other means is useful but cannot offset fossil fuel emissions.

We then describe how the Earth’s capacity to take up excess CO2 from the atmosphere is being outstripped by the rate at which human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, current annual carbon emissions from fossil fuels are ten times greater than the annual amount of carbon that could be stored by sustainable land carbon mitigation methods.
The report concludes that tackling climate change effectively can only be done by reducing fossil fuel emissions deeply and rapidly.