West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) Project

West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) Project is a savanna fire management project located in West Arnhem Land, approximately 100km southeast of Jabiru in the Northern Territory. It was registered in December 2014 and covers 2,816,606.94 hectares.

Savanna fire management projects involve strategic, planned burning in the early dry season to create firebreaks and reduce fuel loads. This prevents larger, hotter, and more destructive wildfires in the late dry season, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and nitrous oxide.

The West Arnhem Land region experiences high monsoonal rainfall and features rugged sandstone escarpments, intact river ecosystems, floodplains, and savanna woodlands with shallow sandy and lateritic soils. The land use is predominantly Aboriginal freehold land dedicated to traditional conservation, cultural preservation, and customary land management, rather than conventional agricultural grazing or cropping.

WALFA is widely recognised as a ground-breaking initiative, being the first savanna burning abatement project anywhere in the world. Originally starting as a voluntary offset partnership in 2006, it became the landscape-scale blueprint for Australia's official savanna burning methodologies. Operated by ALFA (NT) Limited, an entirely Indigenous-owned, not-for-profit carbon business, the project directs its revenue back into supporting Aboriginal ranger groups and traditional owners to manage their ancestral lands. An interesting administrative note for the project occurred in February 2016, when the Clean Energy Regulator issued a notice requiring the relinquishment of 10,644 Kyoto Australian carbon credit units.