Dr Tyron Venn

Senior Research Fellow, School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability, University of Queensland

Dr Venn is a natural resource economist with a research focus on the design and evaluation of resource and environmental policy and practice to facilitate global action to conserve biodiversity, mitigate climate risk and address United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This requires quantification of the complex and sometimes perverse domestic and international carbon, biodiversity and socio-economic trade-offs (including leakages) that can be associated with well-intentioned policy. His research is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative with research institutions, government and industry, including ecologists, agricultural scientists, engineers and social scientists. Methods employed include stratified and replicated field experiments, cost-benefit analysis, lifecycle analysis of carbon, mathematical programming, simulation and applied environmental economics including non-market valuation. Specific research contexts include forest and wood product value chains, Australian Indigenous agribusiness, silvopastoral systems, wildfire risk mitigation and invasive species management.

ABSTRACT

Carbon and financial performance and opportunities for silvopastoral systems

Mitigating climate risk requires substantial changes to socio-economic systems, including livestock production, which accounts for approximately 14% of global anthropogenic carbon emissions. Growing pasture, trees and livestock on the same land management unit in silvopastoral systems provides opportunities to increase farm financial performance while substantially reducing the carbon-intensity of livestock production. In timber-producing silvopastoral systems, a timber income stream can be generated after carbon credit payments diminish. Case studies are presented for Australia and Fiji. Increased adoption of silvopastoral systems by landholders requires long-term rights to benefit from sustainable vegetation management, as well as the development of carbon credit methods that permit natural vegetation management and account for international and domestic leakage.