Thwarting choice, trashing climate targets

Grant Dodson,Forest Owners Association president

Opinion

Labour’s commitment to tighten the rules around farm-to-forestry conversions will thwart land owners’ choice on where they can plant trees and mean that Aotearoa New Zealand will fail to reach its climate charge target by 2050.

In a press statement released on Wednesday, Forestry Minister Hon Peeni Henare said the Government was “empowering local councils” to decide which land can be used for production forestry and carbon forests through the resource consent process.

Placing planting decisions in the hands of local authorities adds another layer of ill-considered regulation that will dictate and limit what landowners can do with their land.

Foresters will be subject to a lengthy resource consent process and restricted by the quantity and type of trees they can plant — if the process permits planting at all.

Farmers wanting to plant their land in trees or sell their land for forestry will be unable to step away from sheep and beef farming.

The proposed suite of changes focuses unduly on the expansion of forestry and displacement of highly productive land.

The premise that forestry is swallowing valuable pieces of highly productive land simply isn’t true. Plantation forestry occupies just

1.76 million hectares of the 13.5-million hectares of agricultural land and has an export return that’s three times greater than sheep and beef production per hectare.

In 2021, the estate expanded by just 1.1 percent and even then, it is still 70,000 hectares smaller than it was 20 years ago.

Even if we achieve by 2035 the hectarage of new forestry planting that the Climate Change Commission is recommending, this would still only mean a 3-4 percent conversion of land from farming to forestry.

An effective land-use framework should balance the needs and deliver benefits across all major land uses — agricultural, horticultural, housing, climate change mitigation and adaptation and infrastructure — not focus on controlling one part of the mosaic.

Restricting and dictating plantings will only result in reduced investment in both production and carbon forests and put at risk the biodiversity, community and economic benefits that sectors like ours offer.

For New Zealand, these proposals mean the use of forestry to offset industrial and transport emissions over the next few years won’t be available in anywhere enough area.

Plantation forests currently absorb more than half the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions.

This announcement is contradictory to the Climate Change Commission’s emissions reduction plan which champions the forestry and wood processing sector as the vehicle for reducing New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Offsetting is a necessary part of land use change and forests are the only tool we have at present to achieve those offsets. Without expansion of forests, reaching carbon zero won’t be possible.