A Greening Australia tree-planting project at Fishery Beach, South Australia. Photo: Trim Photography

GREENING Australia has appointed CBRE’s agribusiness team to increase its national land bank by 330,000 hectares by 2030.

Acting as Greening Australia’s exclusive real estate-services partner, CBRE is looking for leased, licenced or purchased land to help satisfy demand from corporations looking to achieve net zero emissions.

“The scale of the challenge means we need to leverage the best capabilities,” Greening Australia CEO Brendan Foran said.

“CBRE will assist us in meeting our ambitious targets but also reward landholders for their role in improving the environment,” Mr Foran said.

Greening Australia already has a target to plant 500 million trees by 2030.

CBRE agribusiness associate director Phil Melville said the appointment recognised CBRE’s extensive rural network, and aligned with the firm’s global commitment to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from its own operations and from properties it manages for investors and occupiers.

“CBRE is committed to using its expertise, resources and market influence to help our clients reduce the emissions their properties generate and to applying best practices that improve the sustainability of our own operations,” Mr Melville said.

“Through this new partnership, we can extend these efforts to help ensure Greening Australia achieves its targets to restore Australian landscapes and undertake environmental planting projects that provides tangible and long-lasting benefits.

“We see an opportunity to improve the environment and turn underperforming sections of properties into profit-generating assets.”

Greening Australia began conserving and restoring land in 1982, and since then has been addressing environmental challenges such as biodiversity decline, threatened species, and farm salinity, as well as working to boost agricultural productivity.

CBRE’s national Agribusiness team, including Mr Melville, directors Phil Schell, Shane McIntyre, Tom Burchell and Andrew Loughnan, and managing director David Goodfellow, will assist in sourcing land across the country where Greening Australia will undertake biodiversity, carbon and general projects.

These will include:

• Restoring productivity on non-arable and difficult-to-farm areas such as gullies, curves in waterways, hills and salt-impacted areas;
• Exploring opportunities to undertake biodiversity projects on farms for grant, co-investment or Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCU) generation;
• Providing stable and consistent returns on more marginal areas of selected farms via the production of ACCUs;
• Undertaking trials with tangible, measurable and replicable results to enable optimisation and development of regenerative agriculture design.

Source: CBRE, Greening Australia