Project number: 2023-112
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $374,200.00
Principal Investigator: Sarah Castellanos
Organisation: Agricultural Innovation Australia Ltd (AIA)
Project start/end date: 30 Jan 2024 - 29 Sep 2024
Contact:
FRDC

Need

AIA is in active conversations with a private sector consortium. These discussions continue to validate AIA’s approach and solution design. They see clear efficiencies in bringing the RDCs’
commodity-specific carbon research and knowledge together and want to be able to include this type of carbon footprint solution in their own client service offerings.

They are concerned about growers’ lack of preparedness to respond to increasing pressures around demonstrating their carbon footprint and have confidence in a not-for-profit company
like AIA housing the solution and being trusted by growers.

There is acknowledgement that Australia is in a prime position to get this right from the start and avoid the duplication and fragmentation that other countries are now facing.

There were 13 RDCs participating in this phase, involving over 120 interviews across multiple commodities/sectors.
Insights gathered include:
• Many growers are operating mixed enterprises or are keeping that option open to manage risk into the future.
• Concerns include market access, social license, environmental impact.
• Most see a level of reporting required in the near-to-medium future, related to pressure from supply chains, finance or insurance sectors.
• They want the ability to understand and make decisions for their enterprises before regulatory or supply chain pressures intensify.
• Recognition of the need to bring all commodity calculators into one, consistent platform.

These insights speak to the growing importance of and need for the solution approach that AIA is taking.

A Discovery Insights Report, including a specific fishing and aquaculture report, was provide to FRDC in May 2023.

Objectives

1. To develop core infrastructure, being the digital infrastructure required for the initial integration and digitisation of calculators for access and use through the platform
2. To access calculators through the Platform updates recommended by the Technical Advisory Panel and approved by the Governance Group
3. To maintain the Platform to September 2024.
4. To supply resources to support communication of the Platform with FRDC levy payers
5. To integrate with Olrac, Deckhand, Catchlog and an aquaculture farm management software provider

Final report

Author: Sarah Castellanos
Final Report • 2025-09-01 • 3.87 MB
2023-112-DLD.pdf

Summary

This project was part of a wider cross Research and Development Corporation (RDC) collaboration with Agriculture Innovation Australia (AIA). AIA was approved to conduct a project as a cross RDC initiative to digitise and aggregate the existing GAF (Greenhouse Accounting Framework) calculators and other calculators from the different agricultural industry and sectors into a common, scalable, web-based platform. With this objective agreed, Australia’s agricultural industries will be able to share common components of greenhouse gas accounting (carbon emissions) such as the carbon contribution through similar fuels in use, electricity grids, livestock feeds, transport and processing. The FRDC component of this project was to update the greenhouse gas emissions calculator developed out of 2020-089 by Blueshift Consulting. Two Excel calculators (GAFs) were developed: one for wild catch fisheries, and one for aquaculture farming. The GAFs were further developed to customize the input entry fields to these two industry sectors of Fishing and Aquaculture. Within sectors, fishers can select their business type, for example as trawl, lobsterpot, longline, Otter Board trawl, gillnet, purse seine, northern Prawn trawl, southern ocean trawl. For Aquaculture, the business types for selection include on-land fish farming, prawn farming, hatcheries, offshore caged finfish, oyster farming, mussel farming, abalone farming, pearl farming and seaweed farming. The resulting GAF files and the on-line business reporting in the Environmental Accounting Platform (EAP) provides a free carbon emissions calculation tool that can be used as an accredited standard for emissions reporting, as a tool for scenario planning for emissions reductions priorities and management, and as a means for ongoing reporting of continual improvement emissions reductions.