This survey was developed to help estimate greenhouse gas emissions from Armidale Regional Local Government Area (LGA) household energy consumption methods and habits – information only our residents can provide. During 2021 – 2022 participants contributed to capturing robust emissions estimates that will help inform appropriate reduction and offset strategies to guide our collective transition to carbon neutrality. Please note this survey has now closed, stay tuned for future surveys.

Zero30 is a collaboration between the Armidale Regional Council, the University of New England, Business New England, Local Land Services and the broader regional community, supported by Verso Design. Zero30 will achieve certification of the Armidale Local Government Area through the Climate Active Carbon Neutral Standard for Precincts. The Climate Active Carbon Neutral Standard will help us to manage our greenhouse emissions and achieve our goal of carbon neutrality by 2030.

As part of our Zero30 Project, we have developed a suite of Carbon Tracking Tools to assist with calculating carbon emissions and identifying associated activities. We are excited to have built a tracker which is simple to use and relevant to our regional Australian farming community.

A farmer can input data for multiple farms, decide which outputs are relevant to a particular farm and enter relevant numbers to calculate the direct (Scope 1) emissions which are presented as a table and graphed.

We are looking forward to helping our farmers determine and track their farms’ carbon footprint, and equally excited that you will be able to contribute your data directly to our research.

We wish to acknowledge the University of Melbourne’s Primary Industries Climate Challenges Centre (PICCC) and reference the Beef (B-GAF) Farm Greenhouse Accounting Framework Tool, which is freely available as MS Excel spreadsheets, (D-GAF) Dairy GHG Accounting Framework V13.

Version 1 of the Beef Farmer Carbon Tracker Tool was developed in 2020 by regional students, under the supervision of Project Zero30 with support from Verso Design. Four UNE Computer Science 3^rd year students took up the development team opportunity to apply their skills to an industry issue within their studies.  We are delighted to introduce the development team:

Version 2 of the Beef Farmer Carbon Tracker Tool was developed in 2021 by David Miron.

Siddique has a background in soil science and agriculture with particular interest in soil carbon and sustainable land management. He has a PhD in soil carbon dynamics from the University of New England. He investigated the influence of land resource and land use intensity on soil carbon in rice-based cropping systems to find pathways of land use intensification, soil resilience, climate change adaptations and sustainability in a farming region. He holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and two master’s degrees, one in horticulture from Bangladesh and the other in physical land resources from the Ghent University in Belgium. He worked for the Bangladeshi Government in the Ministry of Agriculture as a scientific officer in agricultural development activities, farmer advisory services and regional land survey programs. Siddique is also passionate about land resource inventory and spatio-temporal datasets, as well as the role of landholders in carbon sequestration initiatives to improve productivity, environmental protection and social well-being. Read more about Siddique here.

Leigh Dayes

Leigh is currently studying a Bachelor of Computer Science at the University of New England. Since 2010, he has been employed as an Electronics Technician in The Australian Defence Force. He was born and raised in rural North Queensland, so given the opportunity to work on the Carbon Tracking Tool and assist farmers is a challenge he is looking forward to.

Mitchell Downs

Mitchell works as a Senior Security Analyst for a medium sized cyber security company that works within both private and government environments. He is currently completing his final unit of a Bachelor of Computer Science (Data Science and Software Development) while also holding a number of industry certifications in cyber security, such as GCIA and GCDA. Prior to his work in private industry, Mitchell spent 13 years within the Australian Army. He grew up in the Central West region of NSW before spending time in Newcastle, Wodonga, far north Queensland, Syndey and now Melbourne. He works daily with a number of different programming/scripting languages, and across dozens of tools.