A sea of slash washed onto the Napier foreshore during Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Mark Mitchell
OPINION:
Dear Prime Minister,
A colleague of mine, Ian McRae from Orion Health, recently made the observation that the smoke from your “policy bonfire” ran the very real risk of adding to global warming.
As I watched a number of climate change initiatives tossed on that bonfire, I had to agree.
But credit where credit is due. Or perhaps that should be incentive where incentive is due.
The $140 million your government has committed to assisting New Zealand Steel’s partial conversion to electric furnaces - along with the $100 million hydrogen rebate that could help accelerate the work that companies like The Richardson Group in Invercargill have started with their own $15 million investment in a hydrogen refuelling plant in Gore for its fleet of 1300 trucks - is an encouraging sign.
Perhaps we are at last seeing politicians who recognise that industry is not the enemy.
We are all in this together and, to a very large extent, what we are now dealing with are the unintended consequences of what we once viewed as advances in technologies and industries that would benefit us all.
Cars, plastics, air travel, more productive farms.
I was born in 1950 and I remember marvelling at my first sight of an aeroplane. Or the arrival of electricity in a house where mum had cooked, for as long as I could remember, on a coal-fired range while I read Eagle comics by the light of a gas lamp.
I could never have imagined that one day I would travel the globe in jet planes where the hundreds of thousands of miles I travelled each year, creating high-value jobs back in New Zealand, would add to a global threat called the greenhouse effect.
I can also remember watching as the land around us, some of which my family owned small parcels of, as Māori land, were planted in pine forests because that was an intergenerational investment in our future.
Fast forward to that future, and Cyclone Gabrielle.
When we aren’t cordoning off huge tracts of productive land for trees that are part of an ETS scheme that can be viewed as little more than a financial instrument for overseas companies to buy and sell so they can delay real efforts to lower their carbon footprints, we are alternatively cutting down those trees and exporting them at somewhere between US$60 to US$80 a tonne.
In a country where we are facing a significant housing shortage, it seems that exporting one of the least carbon-generating building materials available to us - concrete is one of the worst - makes very little sense, economically, environmentally or socially.
But what makes even less sense is the waste this limited use of our forest resources generates, along with the damage it causes when events like Cyclone Gabrielle strike.
Your latest budget recognised that cost with the billions of dollars you have had to set aside to repair the damage caused, and to try to prepare and defend our communities against the increasing frequencies of events like Cyclone Gabrielle.
The irony is that the waste, the slash, that caused so much of the damage is worth far more to our economy than the logs which we currently export overseas, and often import back as finished products.
As the co-chair of an organisation called The NZ Product Accelerator, I have had the privilege of seeing the incredible work being done by scientists, working in conjunction with businesses that are moving to take advantage of the huge opportunities that global warming and sustainability offer us as a country.
One of the most significant opportunities lies in the slash and waste that is a result of our current forestry practices that are focused, almost exclusively, on the export of logs.
That opportunity lies in viewing a tree in its entirety, in utilising the whole tree and the residuals that come from it. The thinning, the pruning, the slash and waste left lying on the ground and, of course, the logs themselves.
Then there’s the sawdust and wood chipping that is left over from wood manufacturing. I had never realised the huge value that can be extracted from turning this waste into high-value bioenergy, biomaterials and biochemicals. A scientist from the Scion Research Institute in Rotorua actually suggested that Aotearoa New Zealand could become the Saudi Arabia of biofuels.
It’s a bold claim but these are the vision we need to pursue if we are to not only meet our carbon zero target, but to also create multi-billion dollar exports created from high-value jobs, in the regions, where we grow trees better than anyone else in the world.
I was recently invited to a presentation made by global investors focused on the opportunities around the circular bio-economy, in particular around forests, here in Aotearoa. When I asked, why New Zealand, their answer was simple.
“New Zealand is the brand.”
We need to protect that brand - and seeing images of logs and slash destroying roads, bridges, power stations, homes, businesses and communities, is not something we should contemplate happening again.
We need to be thinking differently. We need to incentivise the businesses that are already making inroads into creating a multi-billion dollar circular bio-economy that takes our slash and turns it into cash.
Conservative estimates suggest that the trash we leave lying on the ground could be worth up to 40 times the value of those logs we export.
I recall that when you became Prime Minister, in one of your first press conferences you said it was time to look forward, not back, and we needed to deal with the issues that faced us now.
Well in the Māori worldview, there is a whakatauki, a proverb, that says “the footsteps we lay down in our past, create the paving stones on which we stand today”.
And in that worldview, the footsteps we lay down are always in front of us. We have to learn from them. Our past has got to inform the solutions for the future.
As a first step, we have to use those lessons to unite us and accept that we are all responsible for ensuring a better world for our tamariki, our children.
I believe our parents, our grandparents, believed that was what they were doing when they planted those forests, when they bought their first car when they gave us our first plastic toys.
Unintended consequences.
Let’s not repeat them by yelling at each other, by blaming each other.
The answers are there, but they will only be heard when we all choose to listen.
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