One week ago, on March 29, the Albanese Labor Government introduced the Nature Repair Market Bill (2023) into the parliament. A Bill that has pleased quite a few local landholders.

The release from the government said, "In a world-first scheme, landowners can be paid by a third party for protecting and restoring nature on their land. It will make it easier for business, philanthropists and others to invest in repairing nature across Australia."

"The Nature Repair Market forms part of our Nature Positive Plan to protect more of what’s precious, repair more of what’s damaged and manage nature better for the future."

"A recent PwC Report found a biodiversity market could unlock AU$137 billion to repair and protect Australia’s environment by 2050."

"Examples of possible projects include:

• Removing drainage ditches, excluding livestock and feral herbivores to restore a natural marsh which will create critical habitat for diverse native frog, fish, turtle and wetland bird species.
• Indigenous Rangers undertaking feral animal exclusion, buffel grass removal, feral cat control and cultural burning in the Central Desert. The certificate generated for the project could support Indigenous Ranger working on country activities for many years.
• Restoring a seagrass meadow permanently lost from historic poor catchment water quality, providing habitat for sea turtles, dugongs, marine fish and seahorses. Monitoring could be provided by local commercial and recreational fishers, who foresee increased local fish stocks.
• The market will be regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator which will have monitoring and enforcement powers to ensure that projects are conducted in accordance with the rules. This includes monitoring, reporting and notification on the delivery of project activities and progress on the environmental outcome." 

Stuart Andrews has been teaching Natural Sequence Farming in Lismore and the Northern Rivers for the past 5 years, this is something his father Peter had been practising on his Hunter Valley farm 'Tarwyn Park' since the 1970s. The first training began in 2012.

Stuart told the Lismore App, "I am very proud of my father for his commitment to pushing successive Governments to go down this path. The projects that the Government has listed are so important to Lismore and echo the messages that my father commenced and that we now teach. Remove drainage ditches – this is vital to the Tuckean Swamp which should be regulating water flows in the Northern Rivers and should be restored to a wetland as soon as possible."

"Protecting and restoring nature on land, if implemented correctly will enable farmers to undertake on-ground works that will hold water in the landscape. This is critical to the upper catchment within the region. You must ‘slow the flow’ of the water through the catchment so that the flood plain recharges within its natural rhythm, not the way it has been recharging in these devastating flood events."

"The PwC report looks at the rationale for the establishment of markets that support changes in biodiversity. It is a good report, however, it records an upside-down pyramid that shows that the highest impact will be obtained from avoidance of negative impacts before they occur and that moderate impact will be achieved in restoration. This is not true for the catchment around Lismore and seems incongruent with the actual level of damage that has already been done." 

"The Lismore catchment was once a rich environment heavily populated with vegetation that slowed water as it made its way to the floodplain. The current environment is a mixture of barren hills, degraded landscapes and monoculture farms that have generated the most topsoil loss in the shortest space of time. The resultant impact is that during weather events, water rushes over these degraded landscapes with a ferocious velocity, dumping on the floodplains causing untold damage as seen in 2017 and 2022. Once the weather event passes, cms of important topsoil are dumped into the river catchments causing further landscape and environmental damage."

"Water must be managed before anything else happens. Based on the knowledge of the day, best endeavours have seen decades of investment across the catchment in Riparian planting, river clean-up, bush regeneration and weed management. These projects in isolation of a strategy to return hydrology to the landscape have been minimally successful in the repair of nature. Evidence of this can be seen in the recent flood event where 20 years of Riparian planting along the Wilson River washed down the river and extreme erosion occurred between Lismore, Wyrallah and beyond. In the upper catchment, we saw massive landslips across every bare-hilled part of the region."

"We are looking forward to gathering the data of the successful projects we have completed in the catchment over the past 4 – 5 years to ensure that a robust baseline exists, and we can use this to go forward and record impacts of the future activity we will guide throughout the catchment. Since commencing work in Lismore, it has always been our vision to undertake vital works in the upper catchment that are nature positive that will reduce the velocity and damage of this fast-moving water."

"The PwC goes on to record benefit categories as direct and indirect. A direct benefit has been given to Environmental Water Trading of $1.6bn with no value recorded for what they refer to as indirect benefit of the water cycle. I estimate that they have recorded it in this way because the work just has not been done to date to quantify the benefits of ‘slowing the flow’."

"We have spoken with key members of the agricultural community who are supportive of projects in the upper catchment and doing this work, together with scientific measurement, will enable the City of Lismore to quantify the benefits to farmers and landholders, businesses and the community as a whole."

Stuart said that in Lismore and the Nothern Rivers about 70 people have taken part in the Tarwyn Park Training. Those 70 people live in various catchments around the area.

"There is a vast number of people that we're still yet to work with, where we want to be able to show them demonstration work so they can see exactly what this can do."

Stuart said he needs about 2 to 3 years to accumulate the data needed as there are so many variables involved like the need for weather events to kick start the work and then a decent rain event to see how it impacts flooding. The Bill allows for a third-party payment via a tradeable certificate if they undertake projects that enhance or protect biodiversity.

"At the moment, a lot of people probably just can't afford to do some of this work and it's not expensive, but they've still got to find extra money to be able to do it and the people who are really going to benefit the most, apart from the increased productivity for those on the land, is going to be governments and the people that live in and around town because they're the ones that cop the impacts and the government or the council fund the bills. Every time there's a flood event, there's massive damage and massive cost and sometimes worst of all, loss of life."

"There's always going to be bigger floods than the ones that that we anticipate there'll be. It's how our landscapes are set up to handle it. There needs to be safety measures put in place because there will always be bigger floods."

"I'm definitely not going to say, oh well, let's stop that one Flood. Who knows? That might have been one flood in 400 years. Who knows? I don't know, but there's a whole lot of other floods that are in between that are having the same impact that probably never did? So, what we've done is we've created a change where instead of that one flood over many years is now happening more regularly. So it might be happening every 10 years. We still have to plan for the larger one, of course. But all the in-between ones, we can manage a lot better than what we currently are."