Additional guidance on climate change and new templates have been added to the Climate Change chapter of the B+LNZ Farm Plan. This will assist farmers to document their GHG action plan and meet this year’s He Waka Eke Noa milestones.
The first He Waka Eke Noa milestones for the agricultural sector – that 25 percent of farmers know their annual total on-farm emissions and have a written plan to manage emissions – are at the end of this year.
B+LNZ is committed to supporting farmers to meet these milestones. Tools such as B+LNZ’s GHG Calculator, launched in July, have contributed to the good progress made on meeting the measurement milestone, and attention has turned to accelerating this progress and helping farmers with written plans.
The best way to get started on all this – and with B+LNZ’s farm planning approach overall – is through one of our workshops.
New specific workshops on Responding to a Changing Climate will shortly be held across New Zealand, COVID-19 allowing – and the ongoing Farm Plan: Environment Module workshops now include the updated chapter and related material. For more details on these and other B+LNZ events, please see the events calendar or contact your local Extension Manager.
B+LNZ launched the Environment Module of the farm plan in March this year, providing tools and resources to help document a farm’s key resources, risks, opportunities, and actions – from soils and freshwater to climate change and biodiversity.
As part of our regular review of materials, we’ve updated the Climate Change chapter of the module, adding additional templates to assist documentation of a farm’s current and planned greenhouse gas actions.
The update of the chapter provides a little more background on emissions and sequestration on farm, including risks and adaptation to a changing climate. It also outlines options to manage methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions and sequestration opportunities on farm.
Additional templates are provided in the new chapter to support recording of actions already implemented, sequestration occurring and plans for future actions on farm. These are available as editable PDFs or the individual templates are available via the Farm Plan webpage. Paper copies of the farm plan ‘Responding to a Changing Climate’ chapter and templates can be requested by emailing resources@beeflambnz.com.
The new Responding to a Changing Climate change chapter can be downloaded from the B+LNZ website or the full Farm Plan: Environment Module can be downloaded from the Farm Plan webpage.
If you’ve completed your Climate Change farm plan templates, you may wish to review the revised chapter and additional templates and update your plans where the new templates better document and/or support your system.