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Climate-action groups (CAGs), whose members are highly motivated and publicly engaged citizens, have emerged in recent years within Australia. This paper draws from a multiple case study of eight Australian CAGs. It considers what distinguishes CAGs within third-sector environmental organisations active on climate change; what CAGs can tell us about the characteristics of people who join similar grassroots TSOs concerned with environmental and sustainability issues; and whether and how CAGs enhance the individual and collective motivations of their members in voluntary climate-change mitigation. The paper argues that CAGs are distinct from the centrally organised and established Australian environmental non-government organisations working in the climate-change policy arena. They are strongly associated with place, and enhance both individual and collective motivations for voluntary climate-change mitigation. CAGs, as grassroots 'niches', challenge the dominant discourses of unsustainability, as they allow actors to develop alternative practices and provide pathways to a low-carbon society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Building adaptive reuse plays a critical role in emissions reduction and supports global climate protection. Thus, the designing of future buildings with embedded adaptive reuse potential is a useful criterion for sustainability. This paper describes the development of a new rating tool known as adaptSTAR, which offers holistic and unified design criteria suitable for assessing the adaptive reuse potential of future buildings. The findings show that criteria can be identified and weighted according to physical, economic, functional, technological, social, legal and political categories to calculate an adaptive reuse star rating. In addition, this paper reports on the first stage of the research methodology used in the initial development of the rating tool and concludes with some preliminary observations from 12 selected successful case studies in New South Wales (NSW) and Melbourne, Australia. The use of adaptSTAR in designing future buildings will lead and help promote low carbon built environments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This commentary offers a background to the carbon challenge, carbon offsets, and emissions trading from an Australian perspective. It sets the scene for a more detailed discussion about carbon sequestration rights, which are defined explicitly by some Australian states and territories but not by others. We highlight that the term carbon sequestration right is poorly defined and relies, inappropriately we suggest, on the borrowed term profit à prendre. This terminology is at odds with the notion of a carbon property right, which has yet to be conceptualized fully by the marketplace and the existing legal framework, given the need to fully engage the sociological and ecological dimensions of carbon and climate change. We find that current policy intent, together with evolving public will and corporate responsibility, is ahead of the science and the legal framework for managing property rights in carbon (used broadly to represent the six greenhouse gasses). The Australian Property Institute has taken the lead in its 2007 policy paper Conceiving Property Rights in Carbon and more recently in Sheehan and Kanas's investigation of "Property Rights in Soil." This article takes the discussion to the next stage by offering a framework for property rights in carbon and asking whether such rights should be vested in the state or the nation, rather than merely creating a commodity that can be efficiently allocated and thus speculated upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon stock change due to forest management and disturbance must be accounted for in UNFCCC national inventory reports and for signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. Impacts of disturbance on greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are important for many countries with large forest estates prone to wildfires. Our objective was to measure changes in carbon stocks due to short-term combustion and to simulate longer-term carbon stock dynamics resulting from redistribution among biomass components following wildfire. We studied the impacts of a wildfire in 2009 that burnt temperate forest of tall, wet eucalypts in south-eastern Australia. Biomass combusted ranged from 40 to 58 tC ha−1, which represented 6–7% and 9–14% in low- and high-severity fire, respectively, of the pre-fire total biomass carbon stock. Pre-fire total stock ranged from 400 to 1040 tC ha−1 depending on forest age and disturbance history. An estimated 3.9 TgC was emitted from the 2009 fire within the forest region, representing 8.5% of total biomass carbon stock across the landscape. Carbon losses from combustion were large over hours to days during the wildfire, but from an ecosystem dynamics perspective, the proportion of total carbon stock combusted was relatively small. Furthermore, more than half the stock losses from combustion were derived from biomass components with short lifetimes. Most biomass remained on-site, although redistributed from living to dead components. Decomposition of these components and new regeneration constituted the greatest changes in carbon stocks over ensuing decades. A critical issue for carbon accounting policy arises because the timeframes of ecological processes of carbon stock change are longer than the periods for reporting GHG inventories for national emissions reductions targets. Carbon accounts should be comprehensive of all stock changes, but reporting against targets should be based on human-induced changes in carbon stocks to incentivise mitigation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]