Wyandra is a 'blink and you'll miss it' town around eight hundred kilometres west of Brisbane.

But this inconspicuous zone, with its red soil and scrubby mulga trees, is actually an integral part of the Australian Government's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep to its Paris Climate Agreement commitments.

And the locals are sick of it.

South-west Queensland is an area in Australia with a large concentration of projects under the Emissions Reduction Fund, which focuses on destocking land to regenerate bush to store or sequester carbon.

But for grazier Peter Lucas, when corporate companies buy vast areas around him, it has repercussions for his business and his community.

"It'll get to the stage where there'll be no income at all coming into the Paroo shire, or any of the local businesses, [they] will have no business whatsoever because they rely on landholders to employ people and their money to be and their money to be spent in local communities, and that's not happening," Mr Lucas said.

From the front gate of his 80,000-acre property Cliffdale, it's a 240 kilometre drive to the next town.

And now, much of that area is unoccupied, leading to problems on his property due to the lack of land management around him.

Wyandra is a 'blink and you'll miss it' town of around 100 people. ( ABC Rural: Melanie Groves )

"They've taken all livestock off them so there's no livestock on those properties at all … there's no-one there even to see if there are wild dog problems or weed problems."

"They're not interested in any fencing because they don't run livestock, they only run trees and they don't need fences for trees," Mr Lucas said.

For Kevin 'Blue' Bredhauer, having neighbours who are corporations farming carbon has been a battle.

"The boundary fences on one of the places are pretty ordinary and my cattle get in there and they [the corporations] threaten me with all sorts of things, lock the water up so my cattle can't get a drink … I mean, we're only talking 15, 20 cows," Mr Bredhauer said.

"They don't seem to understand it's a bit of give and take on this land."

Climate Friendly is a carbon farming project developer, which has numerous projects within the south-west region.

Chief executive officer Freddy Sharpe believed that while absentee landholders was an issue graziers in the south-west were facing, the concerns pre-date carbon farming.

"I would go as far as saying carbon farming actively encourages farmers to stay on the land because the revenue generated by a carbon farming project adds to the total revenue of a property, including the revenue from livestock and other farming activities," Mr Sharpe said.

For those who are absentee landholders, Mr Sharpe believed it was still in their best interests to manage the land.

"They have an obligation to continue to invest in upgrading, protecting the value of that investment, including fencing, [and] including managing feral animals," Mr Sharpe said.

A short-sighted policy?

Carbon projects in the south-west are based on a model called human-induced regeneration, where blocks of land are left to allow trees to grow in order to sequester carbon.

The projects are based on contracts ranging from ten to 100 years where people enter agreements to protect land from being cleared.

But to a grazier like Peter Lucas, this method is destroying the productivity of the land for agriculture.

Mulga trees are slow to grow in western Queensland, and graziers say they don't store much carbon anyway. ( Supplied: Kevin Bredhauer )

What happens to the land after the contracts are finished is still up for debate, with Mr Lucas concerned that the land will be unable to transition back to agriculture in the future.

"Most of these properties are locked up for 50 to 100 years; you'll never be able to knock a tree down on any of these properties even if carbon prices all fall over down the track," Mr Lucas said.

Environmental economics expert and professor at the University of Queensland John Quiggin agreed that the future of the projects was uncertain.

"For these programs to work, obviously the trees have to stay there. If they burn then obviously the carbon in them is released into the atmosphere, so we need a commitment to long-term maintenance, and there seems to be some problems emerging with that," Professor Quiggin said.

But Mr Sharpe thought what happened 25 years or more down the track would be almost irrelevant if the bigger issues of addressing greenhouse gas emissions were not tackled.

"Frankly, environmentally, 25 years is a lifetime and if in 25 years we haven't as a society and an economy managed to control our emissions more broadly then whether the land is cleared or not is almost a minor point," he said.

Drought diversification

While corporations buying properties is one aspect of emission reduction projects in the south-west, some graziers have taken the opportunity to divide their business interests and their land.

For grazier Bill Tomlinson, farming carbon on his Wyandra property was a logical step to create a new income stream on land that was marked as too costly to thin.

For grazier Bill Tomlinson, carbon farming was an ideal diversification option for his business. ( ABC Rural: Melanie Groves )

"The figures stack up for us to do that, it may not work for everyone but in one instance for us they have," Mr Tomlinson said.

Overall, Mr Tomlinson said it had made little difference to the way he operates.

"As time goes by we might have to keep lightening our stocking numbers, but by the same token we're not only ordinary farmers now we're carbon farmers so we've elected to change our land use."

Is the scheme flawed?

Graziers in the south-west still have questions about the projects.

Mr Bredhauer did not think the logic of carbon farming stacked up.

"I think it's very flawed," he said.

"We don't have enough rainfall and we don't have enough big trees, the big mulga trees don't exist anymore … there's not a hell of a lot of carbon stored in little mulga trees, they're not going to achieve much by locking it up," he said.

After troubles with neighbouring corporate carbon farmers, Kevin 'Blue' Bredhauer is concerned big companies "don't understand the way of the land". ( ABC Rural: Melanie Groves )

On a policy level, Professor Quiggin said that overall carbon farming projects simply were not a strong enough strategy made by the government to have any lasting change on Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's essentially a policy that's been completed, there's very little money left in the fund, so unless the government refills it nothing's going to happen. We have the problem that this one effort is really the only climate policy the government has," he said.

"I don't think the government has any serious commitment to carbon reduction at all, but obviously having this one policy they want to make it be seen to be a success, so they're unlikely to be sympathetic to objectors."

The Federal Minister for Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg declined to be formally interviewed for this story, however a spokesperson made the following points in response to an email request after the story was originally published.

"The committee (independent body the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee) has commenced a review of the two methods for regenerating native vegetation," the spokesperson said.

"These reviews will include consideration of the potential for projects to have any adverse impacts

"The committee has released a discussion paper and invited submissions by April 13, 2018

"The committee is also meeting people, including graziers in south-west Queensland, as part of the reviews."

Editor's note (26/03/18): This story has been updated to include a statement from the spokesperson for the Federal Minister for Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg.

