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How environmental planting with integrated Indigenous involvement is restoring land and creating opportunities.
In 2024, we became a foundation investor in the Silva Carbon Origination Fund, alongside BHP and Qantas. The Fund was created by Silva Capital as a way for businesses and financial investors to create large-scale agricultural and environmental planting projects in Australia to generate Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to support the transition to a low carbon economy.
One of the first projects developed by the Fund is the Cooplacurripa Environmental Planting Project in New South Wales. Cooplacurripa is the first project to officially link a legislated biodiversity certificate market with its carbon market, creating a new way to measure and value nature.
The combined project, one of the largest in Australia, is an example of how large-scale environmental planting can capture carbon, strengthen biodiversity, achieve productive agricultural outcomes and create new opportunities for local communities, and Traditional Owners.
Launching a project like this – planting close to 3 million native trees and shrubs planted across more than 6,000 hectares in the next 5 years – requires conviction.
“The kind of integration we do is untested at this kind of scale,” Roger Cameron, Investment Director at Silva Capital, said.
“When we launched our offering, we were a new business seeking to develop large scale environmental planting projects. We needed partners willing to take that leap with us.”
Each tree and shrub plays a role in stabilising the land by reducing erosion, improving water retention and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. The trees and shrubs planted help to reestablish functional ecosystems, ranging from open grassy woodlands (in the lower landscape) through to tall wet-eucalypt forests (in the higher elevations) across Cooplacurripa.
As the vegetation matures, the growing canopy helps create microclimates, the shade helps to moderate the sun’s heat, cooling the soil, with the tree’s expanding root structure binding the soil which reduces erosion, while native grasses and shrubs improve nutrient cycling. Combined, these changes will help the land recover its natural resilience, making it better able to withstand drought, fire and other weather extremes.
But, importantly, the design goes further than tree-planting.
The project’s design also creates long-term biodiversity corridors and places for animals to shelter across previously cleared farmland, connecting ecosystems that had become highly fragmented. This will give native birds, insects and small mammals the space they need to thrive again.
The carbon benefit is significant too.
Over its lifetime, the combined Cooplacurripa Station project is expected to remove and store millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, generating high-integrity ACCUs.
Each ACCU represents one tonne of verified carbon dioxide (CO2-e) sequestered – a tangible contribution to Australia’s net-zero goals and an important signal to investors that large-scale, nature-based solutions can deliver measurable results.
“We’ve already planted more than half a million trees to date, and by the time the full program is complete, that number will be nearly 3 million,” Roger said.
“Each tree is a small act of renewal and together, they add up to real climate impact.”
The effects extend outward, in what Raphael Wood, Co-Managing Director at Silva Capital describes as “concentric circles of benefit”: improving the environment, strengthening rural economies and supporting the growth of a new market for high-integrity carbon credits and biodiversity certificates.
“It’s not about locking up land and walking away,” Raphael said.
“It’s about managing the land in a way that sustains agriculture, biodiversity and communities.”
Our operations require significant energy – around 4 times more than other global diversified mining companies. That’s why we’re focused on finding better ways to manage emissions in a way that benefits people, nature and climate. Our nature-based solutions program is one way we’re doing that. The program delivers, invests in and scales nature-based projects that deliver high-quality carbon credits, while supporting sustainable livelihoods for the communities where we operate, and helping restore and protect the natural systems that support us all.
These projects are subject to our high-integrity criteria – which forms the basis of our due diligence process – and delivered in partnership with experts and local communities. We were among the first to invest in Silva Capital, alongside BHP and Qantas. “It takes leadership from big business to support something that’s still emerging,” Roger said.
“That support helped prove that high-integrity carbon projects at scale are commercially sound.”
Partnerships with Indigenous communities is central to Silva Capital’s project ethos.
The first trees at Cooplacurripa were planted by Biripi Elders and trainee Rangers from the Purfleet-Taree Local Aboriginal Land Council (PTLALC), marking the launch of the “Working on Country” program - a meaningful collaboration in land care, cultural heritage and training opportunities
The team has worked with the PTLALC to identify and protect culturally sensitive areas. Planting trees is central to the project and so is protecting cultural history that exists on the property.
“[This program] means we can care for Country the way our ancestors did, while creating pathways for the next generation. It’s about healing – environmentally and culturally,” Lillian Mosely, CEO of PTLALC said.
The program also supports local Indigenous employment pathways through skills development. Ten community members have undertaken formal training in land management, including ecosystem restoration, environmental planting, cultural heritage management and cultural burning practices.
As Raphael explained, “When you listen to the people who know this Country best, you see the land differently. You work with it, not against it.”
Local Elders have described the project as “true reconciliation”, bringing life back to Country while creating new opportunities for their people.
For the team, success isn’t only measured in tonnes of carbon or dollars invested. It’s in proving that environmental restoration, agriculture and community wellbeing can thrive together.
“If we can show that this model works and that it delivers real carbon, real biodiversity and real community benefit… then the next projects will follow,” Raphael says.
For the partners involved, it’s a step towards a future where restoring land is not just good for the planet, but good business too.