Share of Northern Territory burnt area that fell inside registered ACCU savanna fire-management carbon projects, by year, with an early- vs late-dry-season split. Derived from NAFI 250 m fire-scar shapefiles clipped to an NT land box. Read the caveats below — every number here is a lower bound.
Two ratios with different denominators: blue is managed ÷ all NT fire; orange is managed-late ÷ all late-season fire. Orange sitting below blue every year means fire inside projects skews early — the intended abatement signal. No projects existed before 2012.
Absolute burnt area each year (km²). Bar height is total NT fire — climate-driven and highly variable. The coloured cap is the managed portion, split early/late; the two greys are the unmanaged remainder, also split by season. In the big-fire years the unmanaged-late layer (2011, 2023) is a damaging wildfire that dwarfs the entire managed cap.
| Year | Total km² | Unmgd early | Unmgd late | Mgd early | Mgd late | Managed % | Late-mgd % | Projects |
|---|
Managed % = managed ÷ all NT fire. Late-mgd % = managed-late ÷ all late-season fire.
reproducible from the public NAFI fire-scar archive and the ACCU carbon-project register.
region
attribute is unreliable (absent before 2013, compound strings like “(a) NT (b) WA” in
2015–21, mapping-block codes in 2025) whereas the NT's borders are meridians and a
parallel and there is no fire at sea, so the box selects NT land exactly and identically every year.Declared. For each year only projects registered on or before that year are counted
(a time-varying footprint), so managed area is never credited before a project existed.EPSG:3577) and reported in km²; geometries are repaired with a zero-width buffer first.These are lifted directly from the analysis script's own header. They decide how the figures should and shouldn't be read.
This is a personal look at the physical fire picture in the NT: how much country burns, when in the season, and how much falls inside registered savanna carbon projects. A conversation-starter for people who care about fire and Country; not a formal evaluation, and certainly not peer-reviewed. I'm a greenie coder, not a scientist.
It measures area and season, not emissions. The savanna carbon method is credited in tonnes of CO₂-e from a seasonal emissions model. A project can burn the same area and still abate by shifting fire early. So this deliberately looks at a different axis than the one the credits are counted on; it is not a verdict on whether the method works on its own terms.
My view — and it is purely personal opinion: fire's environmental ledger — biodiversity, the age-structure of long-unburnt habitat, severity, cultural burning, standing carbon — doesn't collapse into one tradeable number. A scheme optimised for emission credits is optimised for a single axis, and whether that serves the others is genuinely contested: the “bioperversity” concern points one way, co-benefit studies the other. I think the single-number frame hides more than it shows, that's why this page looks at the fire itself.
There's nothing “natural” about fire in the NT these days. Displaced traditional fire managers and invasive African grasses have transformed the regime. Gamba grass in the north swaps a 1–3 t/ha native fuel bed for up to 30 t/ha of 4 m grass, and buffel grass (an EPBC-listed Key Threatening Process) drives a hotter, self-reinforcing fire cycle across the arid centre and beyond. So an NT-wide view of harm isn't a category error. The whole Territory's fire is altered, not just the savanna zone.
Scope is deliberate: all-NT fire (the question is NT-wide harm, not project performance), and NAFI's 250 m mapping under-detects small early fires, so managed-early here is a floor.