Northern Savanna Project

Northern Savanna Project is a Savanna Fire Management project located at the Kalpowar area on the Cape York Peninsula, approximately 130km northwest of Cooktown in Queensland. It was registered in November 2016 and covers an expansive 192,516 hectares.

Savanna fire management projects involve the strategic, planned burning of savanna areas during the early dry season. Standard requirements involve combining traditional Aboriginal fire practices with modern methods, such as aerial and on-ground burning, to deliberately reduce ground fuel loads. This methodology creates a mosaic of fire scars that act as firebreaks, mitigating the risk and severity of intense, uncontrolled wildfires in the late dry season, which significantly reduces the release of methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

The Northern Cape Peninsula region is known for extensive Indigenous conservation areas, national parks (such as the adjacent Rinyirru/Lakefield National Park), and some regional pastoral grazing. The project is classified as a high rainfall savanna environment, situated squarely along the 1,000 mm rainfall isohyet. The local soils generally consist of old sandy loams, loamy plains, and heavy cracking clays in the seasonal wetland basins that flood into inland seas during the wet season.

This project provides substantial cultural, social, and environmental co-benefits by supporting Traditional Owners in returning to Country and reintroducing customary caretaking practices. The project has undergone several administrative updates over its lifetime, including a March 2018 variation to remove specific areas from the project boundary, and a June 2025 variation that transitioned the Alka Bawar (Kalpowar) Aboriginal Corporation into the sole proponent after former co-participant Kurrajong Partners Pty Ltd stepped down. The project also successfully fulfilled a 5 million ACCU contract (CAC903889) with the Commonwealth, which was completed in November 2022. Since 2025, Gondwana Carbon has acted as the project's agent, helping to manage ACCU trading to sustainably fund ongoing Indigenous conservation, biodiversity protection, and local employment objectives.