while questions grow about who controls Country
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Near Elliott in the Northern Territory, Mudbarra Country spreads across 2,845 square kilometres of sub-tropical woodland.
Senior traditional owner Janey Dixon describes fire as something ancestral rather than agricultural. "Our ancestors are following us when we light the fire," she has said.
The Karlantijpa Savanna Burning Project has operated on Mudbarra Country since 2015. It now generates income through the sale of Australian Carbon Credit Units. 7
Traditional owners conduct surveys, plan early dry-season burns and bring younger members onto Country. On the surface, the arrangement looks like a policy success. Dig further and the picture fragments.
A structural tension has solidified inside Australia's carbon market. Aboriginal communities possess the oldest continuous land management knowledge on earth. A federal scheme has assigned that knowledge a dollar value, a methodology and an audit calendar.
The question pressing on researchers and land councils is whether the market has captured cultural burning. Or whether cultural burning is using the market on its own terms.
European colonisation carried a conviction that fire was the enemy. Pastoral and park management suppressed burning, breaking cycles maintained for millennia. Vegetation grew thick. The fuel accumulated. When fire arrived, it arrived catastrophic.
Three decades of ecological science confirms what traditional owners had always practised. Early dry-season burning disrupts fuel continuity that allows late-season wildfires to run. 6
The savanna biome produces 86 per cent of all fire events on the continent. It contributes 10 per cent of Australia's total carbon emissions annually. Shifting burning to the early season reduces both greenhouse gas output and biodiversity loss.
The evidence base is anchored in west Arnhem Land. In the mid-1990s, Aboriginal landowners and researchers produced the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project. WALFA covered 28,000 square kilometres and became the world's first savanna burning abatement initiative.
WALFA reduced wildfire-related greenhouse gas emissions by 37.7 per cent over its first seven years. 2
The result rewrote how the carbon market understood land management. It created the template for every subsequent savanna burning project in Australia.
WALFA is now managed by ALFA, Arnhem Land Fire Abatement, an entirely Aboriginal-owned company. Traditional owners created it to control their own engagement with the carbon industry. It supports fire projects across more than 80,000 square kilometres of Arnhem Land.
The structure matters. Ownership by traditional owners defines what flows where. It also defines who retains authority over burning decisions.
The legal terrain for cultural burning remains jagged across Australia. Fire management acts, parks legislation, native title conditions and tenure rules create overlapping jurisdictions. Each is capable of blocking a planned burn.
Liability insurance requirements compound the problem. Most Indigenous ranger groups operate with limited, inconsistent government funding. Insurance costs on certain tenures can exceed what communities can afford.
The legal right to manage Country and the practical ability to do so sit in different places.
The Central Land Council supports fire management across more than 417,000 square kilometres of Aboriginal land. Their program combines customary knowledge with contemporary techniques. Burns follow mosaic patterns across spinifex sandplains during cooler months. 8
The CLC has been clear that burning happens because of obligation to Country. The carbon revenue follows rather than leads. That distinction carries weight.
Cultural burning follows seasonal, ceremonial and ecological cues that resist precise scheduling. Carbon accounting requires fixed windows, documented evidence and regular audits. Communities face a choice between burning right and burning in a way the audit accepts.
By April 2024, 81 projects had registered under the ACCU scheme's savanna fire management methods. Together they generated over 13 million ACCUs. 1
That figure represents nearly 10 per cent of all ACCU issuances. Savanna burning ranks as the fourth largest method by credit volume. Projects now span more than 330,000 square kilometres of northern Australia.
Annual revenue reaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities sits at approximately $50 million. 3
Where communities own and control their carbon enterprise, money flows toward self-determination. Where they participate as junior parties under external aggregators, the calculation changes.
Revenue splits between communities, proponents, aggregators and brokers remain opaque. The Clean Energy Regulator's register records methodologies and ACCU issuances. It does not record what proportion of proceeds reaches the community whose Country is being burned.
The Chubb Review in 2022 called for greater transparency across the scheme. It left the question of Indigenous revenue distribution without a precise resolution. 4
In August 2025, the federal government released two updated savanna fire management methods for public consultation. The new methods incorporate the Savanna Carbon Accounting Model and credit both avoided emissions and enhanced biomass recovery. 9
The Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee assessed the drafts as meeting offset integrity standards. Whether the new methods address structural power imbalances inside project agreements remains an open question.
Research in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2025 described a troubling global pattern. Indigenous communities entering carbon markets face agreements biased toward corporate actor benefits. 5
The paper identified "carbon pirates" who register projects without genuine free, prior and informed consent. Anticipated financial benefits sometimes fail to reach communities. Exploitation generates conflict between communities and project developers.
Australia's savanna burning program is frequently cited as a positive exception. ALFA in Arnhem Land does represent something different from the pattern The Lancet describes. But ALFA developed over decades with meaningful Aboriginal agency at every stage.
Replication requires those same conditions. Where communities hold weaker tenure or projects arrive through external proponents, authority and income distribute differently. Long contractual lock-in periods can extend beyond any government funding horizon.
Internal conflict over carbon revenues has surfaced as a recurrent problem. Project structures that recognise one corporation can leave other family groups outside the revenue stream. Litigation at community cost against well-resourced proponents rarely reflects the true complexity of traditional ownership.
The carbon accounting framework reduces fire to tonnes avoided, seasons documented and satellite coverage verified. It was designed to produce fungible credits that governments and corporations can trade. Cultural burning is about relationship, obligation and knowledge transmission, not carbon arithmetic.
Elaine Sandy, director of Jinkaji Aboriginal Corporation, described the Karlantijpa project this way: "We are bringing together the wisdom of both ways of teaching, our way and kardiba way." The phrase holds two complete knowledge systems in productive tension.
The Chubb Review found the overall ACCU scheme sound. It called for improved data sharing but resisted claims of systematic overstatement. 4
Independent researchers and the Australian Conservation Foundation pointed to "gaping holes" in governance. The 2026 savanna methods incorporate SavCAM modelling and updated science. Independent longitudinal monitoring on carbon-funded Country, with genuine data sovereignty for traditional owners, remains limited.
CSIRO holds Australia's deepest fire ecology research capacity. Budget pressures and staff reductions have constrained its independent monitoring capability. Where that independence weakens, the integrity of the credit scheme weakens with it.
Sean Appoo of the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation put the tension plainly at the 2025 Australian Sustainable Finance Summit. Investment in cultural burning remains insufficient, "coupled with unstable political conditions." Corporate leaders hesitate. Politicians cycle through commitments.
The carbon market bypasses that instability. But it does so by making cultural practice legible to accounting systems built without Aboriginal people in mind.
The Indigenous Land and Sea Ranger program funds rangers including for burning work. Funding per ranger, against the costs of managing vast remote Country, leaves most programs stretched. 10
Without a dedicated federal funding stream for cultural burning, communities face a stark choice. Engage with the ACCU system on available terms, or watch Country go unmanaged.
Indigenous-led policy groups have argued for structural reforms. Stronger consent requirements, guaranteed community revenue thresholds and legal categories for cultural burning are among the proposals. Direct public funding for ranger programs, at sufficient scale, would remove the pressure to enter carbon markets for survival.
The Australian savanna burning program has done something genuinely significant. It channelled real money to Aboriginal communities and restored burning practices that suppression policies had destroyed. Emissions fell across some of the continent's most fire-prone landscapes.
The WALFA-to-ALFA trajectory, from research partnership to Indigenous-owned enterprise, deserves its prominence in policy literature. It does not resolve the structural questions.
Cultural burning exists because of obligation to Country. It carries ceremonial dimensions resistant to documentation. A framework demanding fixed windows and satellite verification sits awkwardly against that reality.
When market requirements bend the practice toward what a methodology can measure, something changes. The fire still burns. Whether it remains cultural burning, beyond a commercial sense, depends on who holds the match.
The 2026 method reforms are a material step toward scientific rigour and Indigenous inclusion. They arrive as Safeguard Mechanism demand for offsets rises, pressuring communities into agreements before governance frameworks are ready. Faster, better-funded and genuinely sovereign alternatives remain the work ahead.
1. Clean Energy Regulator. (2024). Traditional Indigenous savanna burning practices in Kakadu National Park. Australian Government.
2. Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. (2022). Diffusion of Indigenous fire management and carbon-credit programs: Opportunities and challenges for scaling-up to temperate ecosystems. Frontiers Media.
3. Ecology Law Quarterly. (2024). Cultural Burning Can Mitigate Climate Change and Produce Income for Native American Tribes. UC Berkeley School of Law.
4. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. (2022). Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units. Australian Government.
5. The Lancet Planetary Health. (2025). Carbon markets: a new form of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples?. Elsevier.
6. ScienceDirect. (2015). Indigenous benefits and carbon offset schemes: An Australian case study. Environmental Science and Policy, Elsevier.
7. Indigenous Carbon Industry Network. (2025). Karlantijpa Savanna Burning. ICIN.
8. Central Land Council. (2023). Managing Threats: Fire Management across Central Australian Aboriginal Land. CLC.
9. EcoVoice. (2025). Public consultation opens on new savanna burning method. EcoVoice Environment News Australia.
10. The Indigenous Business Review. (2025). Aboriginal Carbon Foundation calls for private investment in First Nations-led climate projects. IBR.
11. Arnhem Land Fire Abatement. (2024). About ALFA NT: Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Northern Territory. ALFA NT.
12. Clean Energy Regulator. (2024). Arnhem Land Fire Abatement case study. Australian Government.
13. RenewEconomy. (2023). Chubb prunes carbon credit scheme, but concern lingers over fossil fuel offsets. RenewEconomy.
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