SSF spotlight: Enhancing our environment and climate

As custodians of over 50% of Australia’s land mass, producers are charged with a significant responsibility to improve environmental outcomes in the country. The Sheep Sustainability Framework’s (SSF) pillar on ‘Enhancing the environment and climate’ is focused on tracking progress in a historically challenging area of agriculture to measure.

This pillar evaluates performance across five priority areas:

• improving natural resource management
• responsible environmental practices
• encouraging biodiversity
• reducing net greenhouse gas emissions, and
• adapting to a changing climate, including extreme weather events.

To improve how progress is recorded, the SSF introduced a new metric this year around maintaining and increasing biodiversity.

In its first year, results indicated that 72.6% of producers were undertaking deliberate activities to measure, maintain or enhance biodiversity on their properties. These activities include groundcover management, minimum tillage and multi-species planting.

Other metrics within the environmental pillar include the percentage of natural resource management regions achieving healthy groundcover thresholds, efficient water use in processing, and minimising waste in processing.

Responsible chemical use, measured by the percentage of producers who have attended a ChemCert course or similar, remains relatively high at 81.8%, with a decrease of less than 1% from 2023.

The SSF is also working to establish a new metric to track conservation practices within the industry. This comes as previously reported data on the percentage of sheep-producing land identified for conservation or protection purposes is no longer collected and reported by ABARES and ABS.

Quantifying climate change efforts

Many indicators in the climate change focus area are based on first-wave data points, with additional metrics expected in the future.

One metric with comparable data points is the percentage of sheep producers who have measured GHG emissions for their enterprise using carbon accounting or similar processes.

The industry saw a 3% increase from the previous year, with 9.9% of sheep producers now measuring GHG emissions for their enterprise.

Additionally, 13.4% of producers have undertaken carbon neutral or carbon accounting training – up from 9% the previous year.

Despite growing recognition of on-farm emissions, the National Producer Survey found a 3.1% decline in producers generating and using renewable energy, now at 46.9%.

Net emissions generated by the sheep industry remain steady at 8.9Mt and net GHG emissions from the industry have generally been declining since 2018.

Looking ahead, the SSF will focus not only on advancing priorities within this pillar but also on developing improved methods to report on hard-to-measure metrics.