Prospects for commercialisation of environmental services such as greenhouse offsets and biodiversity conservation are demonstrably significant.

Under a 20 year, $22M contract, ConocoPhillips, the NT Government and the Northern Land Council have identified an ongoing role for the Tropical Savannas Futures CRC in refining the scientific basis for setting carbon and biodiversity offsets in Arnhem Land , an initiative made possible by current CRC research and partnerships.

In addition to this ground-breaking greenhouse offset project, two additional projects, larger in spatial and commercial scale, are under negotiation. Potential exists to develop five such major projects during the life of the CRC. Conservatively, this equates to $200M additional private investment (net value approximately $139M) in wildfire mitigation for greenhouse and/or biodiversity offsets. Key partners in this work will be the North Australia Indigenous Land & Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA) and Rio Tinto as well as ConocoPhillips.

In addition to such direct offsets, the CRC will work to increase regional benefits from extraction and processing by fostering development of new, regionally-based enterprises that draw on its areas of expertise and the complementary interests of miners. It will help realise the “social licence” to operate through strategies for better local capture of economic benefits.

A key Tropical Savannas Futures CRC contribution to economic growth in the mining and energy sectors will be to identify and design initiatives that capture larger proportions of incomes locally, driving both directly-dependent and spin-off enterprises that, in turn, foster industry access to land, labour and services.