BRUCE WARD, Farm Consultant, and Candidate for Climate Change Coalition in the NSW Elections for Legislative Council says that, unbelievably to many, our grasslands will be in the front line of the battle to overcome human induced climate change, a battle he says will require widespread biological and technical changes at the farm level:

Formerly the General-Manager of one of Australia's largest cotton producing organisations, Bruce Ward has a lifetime of practical farm management. He is now convinced that the era of industrial agriculture is about to close, and that a new era of genuinely profitable, biologically sound agriculture has begun.

When announcing that he would stand for the Climate Change Coalition, Mr Ward said: "Human induced climate change involves the release of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gaseous combination of carbon and oxygen that was first harvested and safely stored as coal, oil and gas millions of years ago through photosynthesis by plants. We are now re-releasing this material on farms and in our factories and homes, and experiencing the biological consequences. We risk massive biodiversity loss."

"To stop future CO2 emissions clearly requires 'technological' solutions. Because these are unbelievably expensive, these types of solutions are very sexy for politicians to talk about. For scientists and engineers they are usually the holy grail of their entire career, even though, in most cases there are long lead times before they will be effective, if ever they become effective."

"My concern," Mr Ward said, "are the legacy loads of CO2 we have already released into the atmosphere. There is no known technical solution that can overcome the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere."

Mr Ward said: "To capture and safely store existing CO2 requires an altogether different approach to that required to prevent future releases. The different approach is an age-old natural process called photosynthesis, employed each day by green, growing plants such as trees and grasses, to power their growth."

"The vast area of Australian grasslands and their soils are the key," said Mr Ward. "When plants and animals are properly managed our soils rapidly transfer vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil. Each 1 per cent increase in organic matter of our Australian soil removes more than 25 billion tonnes of atmospheric CO2."

"Farmers will achieve these outcomes for our nation immediately they know they will be supported by the population. The population of Australia will benefit because air will rapidly become cleaner, our water more plentiful and most importantly, our food will become more nutritious. It truly is a win-win situation," Mr Ward said.

Mr Ward has called on all parties in the NSW election to support the immediate implementation of a soil-carbon trading regime. "We simply cannot wait for the Federal Government to act on this. The states must drive this process. State governments must display the kind of leadership we require, and all NSW political parties have the chance to state their case right now," he observed.

Acknowledging that one of the impediments to introducing a soil-carbon trading scheme has been the perceived lack of precise measuring techniques for soil carbon, Mr Ward called for a radical change in the attitude of scientists and governments. He said, "We do not precisely 'measure' the carbon in plantation timber lots, we simply 'assess' the volume of carbon sequestered using formulae. There is an acceptable and wide ranging error margin in that process, and we must adopt the same liberal approach to soil based carbon captured in grasslands as well."

Mr Ward concluded, "The most important thing is to get on with the job of rewarding the people who do good things and discourage the things we do not want. We will all be better off in both the short and long term. We will be far better off being approximately right, now. We will be entirely wrong if we wait any longer".

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