Cull of Australia's burping buffalo urged to reduce greenhouse gases

A buffalo: in between burps

Northern Australia has long been home to herds of roaming buffalo, but an academic is now calling for the feral animals to be culled in a scheme that would reduce greenhouse gases and could allow local communities to sell carbon credits.

An estimated 150,000 buffalo roam remote areas in the country's north, in a seemingly unobtrusive manner. But their tendency to burp out vast amounts of methane is making a significant contribution to global warming, according to Charles Darwin University professor Stephen Garnett.

"Each adult buffalo produces the equivalent of about a tonne of carbon dioxide each year and they live quite a long time," he told ABC News over the weekend. "So that is a reasonable amount of carbon dioxide they are producing."

Garnett envisioned a scheme whereby indigenous people in the Northern Territory's remote communities would by paid by companies to cull the animals to earn carbon offsets.

He noted that there was a precedent for such a scheme in the form of ConocoPhilips' existing deal with aboriginal communities, which sees the oil giant pay for carbon dioxide-emitting bushfires to be controlled under an agreement that then earns the firm CO2 offsets.

"It would seem logical to extend this to these four-legged methane factories, " Garnett told Northern Territory News.

The belching beasts are not indigenous to Australia, having been introduced from Indonesia more than 160 years ago. In addition to raising methane levels, buffalo have been blamed for damaging freshwater wetlands in Australia. When herds trample tidal banks, it lead to the flow of saltwater into surrounding low-lying swamps and other freshwater wetlands.