Investments in projects that aim to capture and store carbon in vegetation and soils are often based on potential cost-effectiveness. That approach can overlook the people and communities who live where these projects happen – the very people whose participation and support determine whether initiatives succeed. To bring social and economic contexts and impacts into the frame, the CSIRO team developed a Social Intel for Sustainable Investment Decisions dashboard with DiscoverEI to spark dialogue with partners around the social and economic data that could help inform investment decisions. Dashboard available: https://research.csiro.au/vsfsp/valuing-local-provenance/.
This session drew on a new open access paper published in Sustainability Science (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-025-01729-0), that shows how social measures could help inform carbon abatement investment decisions. The paper describes work from a partnership between a project team in CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform and the Queensland Government’s Land Restoration Fund.
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