Our own calculations show that successive governments have kept increasing their projections for how much carbon they believe the land use sector is storing. That’s happened every year since 2018.

If you keep changing how big a carbon sink land use is, you seem to make the task of cutting emissions a lot easier. The topline figure of a 25% fall in emissions sounds great. But in reality, there’s been very little change, if we avoid land use.

The Albanese government has now repeatedly changed how it calculates how much carbon the land sector is storing, as well as future projections. Between the end of 2021 and 2023, the government’s figures changed markedly. Land use as a way to capture carbon soared, from 16 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year to a whopping 88 megatonnes a year as of 2022.

This is a staggering 17% of Australia’s 2022 fossil fuel and industry emissions. By changing these projections, our national emissions over 2022-23 magically appear to have fallen 6% in a year.

Every time the government recalculates how much carbon the land use sector is storing, the less work it has to do on actually cutting emissions from fossil fuels and industry sectors. That means it only needs emissions from fossil fuel use, industry, agriculture and waste to fall 24% by 2030, rather than 32%.

These changes to land use accounting may sound arcane, but they have very real consequences.

Offsets now in question

The Albanese government came to power promising action on climate and action on the environment. In the Government’s Future Gas Strategy we are seeing clear avoidance of the scientific evidence on the need to rapidly reduce fossil gas use to limit warming 1.5C, and on how rubbery and questionable carbon offsets are. Its net zero target strategy includes 10% of offsets.

Scientists have recently published work showing that of 143 projects registered under the government’s “Human Induced Regeneration” (HIR) offset program, the vast majority had seen minimal increases in carbon storage of less than 20%.

Most of these revegetation schemes had given us little or no real, additional and long-term increase in carbon storage, although the offsets have allowed real, additional carbon dioxide emissions to be pumped into the atmosphere, where they will remain for thousands of years.

No credible pathway

The only pathway we have left to limit warming to 1.5°C is political. Leaders must take up their responsibility to actually act and develop measures to rapidly cut carbon emissions.

Cutting emissions means not emitting them. Relying on offsets or changing how much we think the land is absorbing is not enough.

Sadly, our current government seems set on a sleight of hand. Rather than cutting fossil fuel and industry emissions 50% or more by 2030, as it should, the Australian government’s changes to land use accounting mean it has to do much less.

This is not a credible pathway towards net zero.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.