Abstract
Land managers face growing societal and policy expectations to produce more food, conserve biodiversity, enhance carbon sequestration, maintain economic viability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet practices affording these outcomes may not be congruent. Using a transdisciplinary participatory approach with Australian sheep producers, we co-design interventions intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously improving biodiversity, productivity and profitability. Planting native trees yields the greatest abatement potential, followed by antimethanogenic feed supplements. Nature-based solutions and emissions-removal practices are generally more profitable than emissions-reduction measures, particularly antimethanogenic feed additives. Nonetheless, carbon sequestration in soils and vegetation diminishes longitudinally and remains reversible, whereas emissions reductions, such as avoided enteric methane, are continual and permanent. We conclude that (1) greater benefits arise when interventions target contextualised economic, environmental, psychological and institutional constraints, and (2) stacking complementary innovations yields more favourable outcomes than isolated practice changes, particularly when interventions target underperforming indicators.
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Data availability
Data generated in this study are deposited in Zenodo under accession code https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17708034. Further information are provided in the Supplementary Information file.
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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), who invests in research, development, innovation and marketing activities along the global supply chain for Australian wool (Project No. OF-00614; M.T.H., K.M.C.-W., S.M.), and Meat & Livestock Australia (Project No. B.CCH.2121; M.T.H., K.M.C.-W., G.B., K.M., R.A., R.W., G.R., L.W., N.D.B., S.M., F.C.G. and H.B.). AWI is grateful for its funding, which is primarily provided by Australian wool-growers through a wool levy and by the Australian Government, which provides a matching contribution for eligible R&D activities. We are grateful to the case study farmers for their time, effort and careful thought in co-refining results in the paper. We acknowledge support from Hamideh Keshavarzi in conducting the economic analyses. This study was approved by the University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee (Ethics Reference Number H0017705). We thank Esri for the use of their ArcGIS Pro software (version 3.4) in the preparation of basemaps presented in this paper.
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G.B., K.M.C.-W. and M.T.H. wrote the first draft; R.A., L.J.W., F.C.G., N.D.B., G.B. and K.M.C.-W. conducted farm systems simulations; K.M. and H.B. conducted biodiversity assessments; G.B,. A.D., C.C., C.M.R., L.J.W., K.M.C.-W., and M.J.K. economic analyses; M.T.H. and S.M. liaised with case study farmers; R.W. and G.R. conducted FlintPRO simulations; M.T.H. conceptualised the study; G.B., K.M.C.-W. and M.T.H. conceptualised the interventions; all authors revised the manuscript.
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Bhattarai, G., Christie-Whitehead, K.M., Drake, A. et al. Tailoring Australian carbon farming can realise greater co-benefits. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68628-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68628-5
