Darling River Eco Corridor #33

Darling River Eco Corridor 33 is a Human-Induced Regeneration (HIR) project located approximately 45km northeast of Bourke in the Far West region of New South Wales. Registered in November 2017, the project spans a significant area of 36,137 hectares. This location falls within the Bourke Shire Council area, a region historically defined by extensive rangeland grazing of sheep, cattle, and goats.

Human-Induced Regeneration projects differ from tree planting initiatives; they focus on assisting the natural recovery of native forests by removing suppression activities. Standard requirements for this methodology involve ceasing mechanical clearing and managing grazing pressure, often from livestock and feral animals, to allow in-situ seed sources and rootstock to regenerate. The forest must eventually attain a canopy cover of at least 20% and a height of 2 meters to generate credits.

The environment in this part of the Murray-Darling Basin is semi-arid, characterized by low and variable rainfall averaging around 350mm annually. The landscape typically features red earth soils (kandosols) on ridges and grey cracking clays (vertosols) on the floodplains. Vegetation in this corridor generally consists of Mulga (Acacia aneura), Poplar Box, and Coolabah woodlands, which are resilient to the harsh, dry conditions but susceptible to overgrazing by feral goats.

This project is part of a broader portfolio by the proponent, Terra Carbon (a subsidiary of GreenCollar), known as the "Darling River Eco-Corridor." This initiative aggregates multiple properties to create landscape-scale connectivity for wildlife while diversifying income for landholders. A critical component of these projects in the Bourke region is the humane management of feral goats, which are a primary suppressor of vegetation regrowth in the Mulga Lands.