Northern Savanna Project

Northern Savanna Project is a savanna fire management project located at Kalpowar Station on the Cape York Peninsula, approximately 150km northwest of Cooktown in Queensland. It was registered in November 2016 and covers 192,516.01 ha.

Savanna fire management projects involve the strategic and planned burning of savanna areas during the early dry season. This cultural burning creates a patchwork of fire scars that reduce fuel loads, thereby lowering the risk and intensity of destructive late dry season wildfires.

The Kalpowar Station area is historically known for cattle grazing, having operated as a pastoral lease, and increasingly for Indigenous conservation and cultural land management. The area is considered a high rainfall zone, receiving around 1,000mm of rain annually, and the regional soils are generally clay.

This project was set up to look after Country in traditional ways using fire management techniques passed down over 60,000 years. It provides employment and new technology training for local Indigenous youth through joint ranger programs. The project is managed by the Alka Bawar (Kalpowar) Aboriginal Corporation, who became the sole proponent following a variation in 2025. Corporate partners like Insurance Australia Group (IAG) have actively supported the project by purchasing over 7,000 Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) as part of their Stretch Reconciliation Action Plan.