The month, Bobby Miller joined a panel at Commonwealth Bank’s Momentum 2024 Conference to talk about what emissions tracking does for a farming business. He was on the panel with Angela Hammond from Landcare Australia and Mark Gubbins from Coolana Rural, and the session was moderated by CommBank’s Natasha Greenwood.
A phrase has been doing the rounds in agricultural finance for a while now, the triple bottom line, which covers profitability, productivity and sustainability. There’s a version of that conversation that treats emissions tracking as a compliance task, something a bank or a buyer asks for and a producer completes. Bobby’s contribution was about what it does for the business beyond that.
When you know where your emissions come from, you start to see the business differently. Inputs that were once just costs become levers for both financial and emissions efficiency, and emissions intensity, which is the relationship between how much you produce and how much is emitted to produce it, gives you another way of reading how the business is performing. Having that information in a format you can share with your bank, the businesses you supply and your insurer also changes the nature of those conversations, and you stay in charge of who sees it.
The feedback we’ve had from producers on the platform has been clear on this point. The value is in the process of building a report as much as in the report itself. Working through the figures shows you where the big emissions sources are, and that is what lets you start thinking about the changes to management or inputs that might move them.
That framing lands well with agricultural finance audiences. The financial sector’s interest in farm-level emissions data has moved well beyond green credentials, and it’s increasingly about risk and resilience as well as long-term viability.
Thanks to Natasha Greenwood and the CommBank team for hosting an event that takes the emissions conversation seriously and gives producers and industry the space to work through it together.
