Arcturus Downs Biodiversity Restoration Project 1

Arcturus Downs Biodiversity Restoration Project 1 is an environmental planting project located at the Arcturus Downs Aggregation, approximately 32km from Springsure and 61km from Emerald in Queensland's Central Highlands. It was registered in October 2025 and originally covers 12,501.80 hectares, with additional areas added to the project boundary through a variation in February 2026.

Environmental planting projects involve establishing and maintaining a permanent, mixed-species planting of native trees and shrubs. Standard requirements dictate that the species mix must reflect the structure and composition of the local native vegetation community, typically aiming to achieve forest cover at a density of at least 200 stems per hectare.

The Central Highlands region is highly regarded for its large-scale agricultural operations. General land use in the area includes irrigated and broadacre dryland cropping, producing cotton, sorghum, wheat, and mungbeans, as well as beef cattle breeding and backgrounding on native vegetation. The environment features a reliable average annual rainfall of approximately 685mm. Soils in the project area are highly productive, consisting mostly of brigalow and deep alluvial scrub soils adjacent to the Comet River and Springsure Creek.

This project was established by Meldora Land Management, a natural capital platform launched with a $250 million investment from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and Canadian pension fund La Caisse. The Arcturus Downs aggregation was acquired in late 2025 as the platform's first major asset to integrate genuine biodiversity restoration into an institutional-scale mixed-farming landscape. High-integrity Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) generated from these plantings will have Rio Tinto as a foundation off-taker, while traditional cattle and cropping operations continue on the remaining productive agricultural land.