North Kimberley Fire Abatement Project — Traditional Owner-Led Savanna-Burning Carbon Businesses (Western Australia)

Since 2014, four Traditional Owner corporations — Wunambal Gaambera, Dambimangari, Wilinggin and Balanggarra — have registered carbon-farming businesses over their exclusive-possession native title lands in the North Kimberley region of Western Australia, supported by the Kimberley Land Council. The Wilinggin Fire Project alone covers more than 1,000,000 hectares of native title land.

Rangers carry out planned, low-intensity early dry-season burning to create firebreaks and reduce fuel loads, shifting the fire regime away from the destructive, high-emission wildfires that historically dominated the late dry season. Verified abatement generates Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) under the national savanna-burning method.

The Kimberley Land Council reports that controlled burning across the 6.8-million-hectare region has avoided a scientifically verified 400,000 tonnes of CO2 since 2014, with over 1 million ACCUs generated in total and around 300,000 generated in the most recent two-year reporting period. A 2024 peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire examined 22 years of data across 11.7 million hectares and found fire frequency had decreased across 42% (1,611,132 ha) of the area under Indigenous fire management. Kimberley-wide savanna-burning carbon revenue for Indigenous organisations was reported at around AU$50 million/year by 2023 — a regional aggregate spanning multiple projects, not this project alone.

Independent, peer-reviewed landscape-scale verification over more than two decades makes this one of the more rigorously evaluated Indigenous fire-carbon programmes globally; as with comparable savanna-burning projects, biodiversity and water/soil outcomes are plausible but not separately quantified here.