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Ngati Porou is planning to enter the "carbon-farming" business.
The tribe is to launch a joint venture with British-based ethical investor Sustainable Forestry Management.
It plans to plant thousands of hectares - 30,000ha is the long-term target - of Ngati Porou land under the Government's new permanent forest sinks initiative.
The scheme will allocate internationally tradeable carbon credits to landowners who establish permanent forests on land that is prone to erosion.
The credits reflect the value created under the Kyoto Protocol of carbon taken out of the atmosphere by trees on land not already forested in 1990 - Kyoto's year zero.
It aims to encourage the reforestation of marginal, erosion-prone land that, with the benefit of hindsight, should never have been denuded of its natural vegetation.
Ngati Porou Forests chairman Whaimutu Dewes said the initial target was to acquire forestry rights to a portfolio of some 10,000ha of Ngati Porou land.
"We are talking to the landowners and they agree in principle that they want an economic return, but there is still a way to go," he said.
Sustainable Forestry Management would put up the development capital and contribute its expertise in the arcane but rapidly developing world of international carbon trading.
The rules of the Government scheme allow some harvesting of the trees, as long as a permanent forest canopy is preserved.
It is not intended for plantation forests, which are normally clear-felled.
Dewes said most of the area would be planted in eucalypts but some sites would be better suited to pine or regenerating native bush.
In the worst case, he said, if the global carbon market collapsed, the landowners would still be left with growing forests.
But it was much more likely that global demand for forest sinks as offsets for emissions from smokestacks and car exhaust would grow strongly, he said.
Climate Change Minister David Parker said a lot of work had been done to develop a carbon market in New Zealand.
"If [carbon credits] are more negotiable, they will be more valuable."
