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Adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement has expanded Kyoto Protocol rules for carbon abatement actions from forest vegetation to include all land management actions. This change has the potential to significantly increase the area eligible for vegetation-based carbon sequestration actions and will allow countries to include these actions across extensive areas of low-biomass within national carbon abatement plans. Using the Australian rangelands as a case study, an area comprising approximately 5.55 million km2, we assess the latent terrestrial carbon abatement potential under two eligibility scenarios. Firstly, areas of the Australian rangelands that meet the Kyoto Protocol minimum 20% tree canopy cover potential (forest) and secondly the large, previously unaccounted for part of the Australian rangelands where dominant cover potential is less than the Kyoto 20% requirement (sub-forest). We define areas eligible for assisted natural regeneration under the Australian national Emissions Reduction Fund ACCU Scheme using national scale land use, forest and vegetation spatial datasets and model carbon abatement potential across these areas using the Full Carbon Accounting Model (FullCAM 2.0). Results show up to 512,089 km2 and 354,770 km2 of eligible land under the forest and sub-forest scenarios respectively providing a total abatement potential of 1,882.4 MtCO 2e and 866.4 MtCO 2e over a 25-year modelling period. In an economic assessment of this opportunity, we found most of this latent abatement potential was economically viable at current low carbon prices (between AUD 17 tCO 2e-1 and AUD 32 tCO 2e-1) available within the Australian government and secondary markets. This is the first study that assesses latent carbon sequestration potential in Australian "sub-forest" ecosystems. We highlight the prospects for (particularly Indigenous) economic development in remote Australia.