A free webinar with Dr Martino Malerba on Managing farm dams to reduce carbon emissions while improving biodiversity and water security
About this event
Farm dams are the most abundant type of freshwater wetland in Australia. Farm dams are also among the highest greenhouse gas emitters of all freshwater ecosystems, producing the equivalent of 385,000 cars each day in Victoria alone.
In this 1 hour webinar presentation, Dr Martino Malerba, a senior environmental scientist at Deakin Uni.’s Blue Carbon Lab, will discuss how farms can be managed to reduce carbon emissions whilst improving biodiversity and water security – follow this link to reserve your place EVENTBRITE.
Dr Malerba manages the Teal Carbon group at Deakin Uni.’s Blue Carbon Lab, which focuses on the sustainable management of freshwater systems and leads an interdisciplinary research team to quantify the scale of these emissions, explore strategies for greener practices, and develop financial mechanisms for better management. His research group collaborates with CSIRO to develop hydrological modelling, with the National Carbon Inventory team to quantify carbon emissions from freshwater systems, and with the Clean Energy Regulator to develop new methodologies to award carbon credits for farm dam management.
This year Dr Malerba was awarded a DECRA Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to expand his research on farm dam emissions.
This webinar is made possible with funding through the Australian Government’s Future Drought Fund Natural Resource Management Drought Resilience Program which is supporting ACT NRM to work with land managers to improve the drought resilience of water resources on rural lands across the ACT.
About Martino
Martino leads the Teal Carbon group at Deakin’s Blue Carbon Lab. He is an environmental scientist, ecologist, and evolutionary biologist whose research focuses on freshwater wetlands.
Equivalent to coastal wetlands, teal carbon ecosystems are key to regulating greenhouse gases and mitigating the effects of climate change. However, their degradation due to land-use change, pollution, water extraction, and landscape modification can release large amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere.
For example, farm dams are among the highest greenhouse gas emitters of all freshwater ecosystems. Yet, simple management interventions (such as using fences to exclude livestock) can change these systems from a source of pollution (carbon sources) to becoming part of the solution (carbon sinks).
Dr Malerba’s research team works to quantify carbon emissions, restores degraded sites, explores strategies for greener practices, identifies social drivers of sustainable development, and explores financial mechanisms for better management of freshwater resources.
His research is supported by the Australian Research Council through a DECRA Fellowship. He collaborates with the Australian National Carbon Inventory team to improve our estimates of carbon emissions from freshwater systems, and with the Clean Energy Regulator to develop new methodologies for financial incentives (carbon credits).
Extract from the Blue Carbon Lab Website