Fish River Fire Project — Indigenous Savanna-Burning Carbon Abatement (Northern Territory, Australia)

Fish River Station, a former cattle lease about 150 km south of Darwin, was jointly purchased in 2011 by the Australian government, the Indigenous Land Corporation and conservation partners. In October 2012 it became the first property in Australia registered under the Carbon Farming Initiative to generate and sell savanna-burning carbon credits on the open market, with Traditional Owners and the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation (ILSC) managing the fire programme.

Rangers carry out strategic, low-intensity burning early in the dry season to create patchwork firebreaks and reduce fuel loads, preventing the larger, hotter, more carbon-intensive wildfires that historically swept through the region late in the dry season. Abatement is calculated against a historical fire-emissions baseline and verified for issuance of Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs).

The Carbon Eyes ACCU registry lists a registered project area of 178,083 hectares. Country Needs People reports that in 2013 the project sold 23,500 tonnes of verified offsets to Caltex at over AU$20 per tonne, and was later contracted under an Emissions Reduction Fund auction to deliver 115,000 tonnes of abatement over five years. A peer-reviewed case study documents the project's methodology as one of the first operational tests of Indigenous savanna-burning carbon abatement in Australia.

As with most savanna-burning carbon projects, biodiversity and water/soil outcomes are plausible co-benefits of reduced late-season wildfire but are not independently quantified here — the rigorously evidenced outcome is the change in fire regime and the verified carbon abatement.