Narnia is the fictional land invented by CS Lewis where he took Alice for epic brawls between good and evil.
A Goodreads reviewer described Narnia as a land where magic meets reality, and the result is a fictional world whose scope has fascinated generations.
Magic crashing into reality.
Fiction is absorbing because it could be true. All we have to do is suspend our disbelief long enough to identify with the characters in the story and we are invested, even with a white rabbit that talks.
Where the rabbit hangs out, we believe too.
Thank goodness
Life would be strange, but not half as fanciful without fictional lands imagined for our entertainment.
As my wife reminds me, we are in and of this world. That is the real one that we inhabit every day. The one that throws up challenges, curveballs and exposes everyone to COVID.
Sometimes it feels imagined when everyone in the neighbourhood locks down, and the bustle suddenly stops. There are no cars, few buses and dogs taken for more walks than they ever thought possible.
Then previously unacceptable rates of infection that made lockdowns essential are ok after all. Case numbers can grow exponentially. It feels like a 180 because it is — the race that was not a race is not a race again.
Maybe it is Narnia.
CSIRO seem to think so.
In this mythical land, payments for environmental services such as carbon sequestration, clean water and habitat for wildlife would be 80% of the roughly $65 billion in agricultural production worth 6% of GDP.
In a generation, the budget will somehow shift to pay 6% of current GDP on environmental services.
First, let’s make a few context numbers available.
As of 2020, agriculture accounts for
- 55% of Australian land use (427 million hectares, excluding timber production)
- 25% of water extractions (3,113 gigalitres used by agriculture in 2018–19);
- 11% of goods and services exports in 2019–20;
- 1.9% of value-added (GDP) and
- 2.6% of employment in 2019–20
In other words, Australian agriculture is conspicuous without being the backbone of the economy.
Services deliver a steady two-thirds of GDP and industry a quarter, whilst in dollars, mining provides around $200 billion.
The big employers in Australia are health care, retail, professional services, construction and retail, who all have more than 3x the number of workers as agriculture.
Australia is one of the most food-secure nations in the world. Not only is agricultural production diverse across the varied climate and soils of the continent, with an array of nutritious foods grown, but Australia also produces more food than it consumes, exporting around 70% of agricultural production.
As of 2020, around 3.5 million people, 14% of the population, live in rural areas. This population has declined as a proportion of the total population but has doubled in absolute numbers since 1960.
https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?indicators=SP.RUR.TOTL&locations=AU
In summary
Not a big deal for the economy or employment, already growing enough food with a stable rural population.
Not too many of these fundamentals suggest the need for an environmental market.
A $48 billion environmental market
Climate change is the only driver to promote a market equivalent to 80% of the agricultural sector.
Somehow, society would decide to seed emissions offsets and other environmental credits to kick start a market where consumers and taxpayers pay for actions that deliver fungible environmental credits.
This would be a fantastic outcome.
Farmers and landholders would be paid to put carbon back into soil and vegetation, hold water on their land, restore habitat, fence off streams and restore habitat for wildlife.
But we fund all of these activities already. Only it is done with a few dollars at the margins.
So what would be different in the next 20 years that has not already been the case for the past 30?
The rhetoric about climate change perhaps?
Delivering on commitments to the Paris agreement?
A 180 on climate policy?
A young girl named Alice falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world?
Hero image from a photo by Szymon Fischer on Unsplash
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