FECS

• That’s one reason why the Australian government is looking to alternatives such as a nature repair market.
• This, the government hopes, would boost biodiversity – especially on private land such as farms.
• To make this market work, the government might consider creating a new version of Australia’s well-known HECS higher education loans.
• This work will boost farm productivity and biodiversity with farmers repaying the loan when their revenues permit.

Why is this needed?

• To prevent further extinctions, the government announced it would introduce a new nature repair market.
• This market could, if done well, tackle some of the drivers of biodiversity loss and land degradation – particularly on our farmland.
• Protecting habitat and waterways, preventing erosion and improving drought resilience would all be eligible.
• Read more:
  We must look past short-term drought solutions and improve the land itself

  But farmers can make this money back.

How would this work with the nature repair scheme?

• The federal government has pitched its planned nature repair market as an offset scheme: farmers and landholders do repair work and get biodiversity certificates which can be bought by, say, another farmer wanting to clear land.
• All farms experience large swings in annual revenues from forces outside a farmer’s control, such as rain, drought, floods and commodity price shocks.
• The best financial tool to help farmers undertake nature repair is the type which smooths their income.
• If these loans were added to our nature market, it could get much more traction than a grant scheme.

What about the transparency problem?

• To avoid this, projects tied to a FECS loan would have ensure plantings, shelterbelts and dam renovations are effective and meet standards.
• We could borrow from decades of monitoring hundreds of sustainable farms in endangered temperate woodlands to create robust standards.
• As we wrestle with the best way forward for Australia’s first nature repair market, we should seriously consider rolling out revenue-dependent loans for farmers.
• He is a member of Birds Australia that seeks to boost bird conservation outcomes on farms