Whanganui Federated Farmers president Mike Cranstone asks is Carbon Zero simply creative accounting?
Whanganui Federated Farmers president Mike Cranstone asks is Carbon Zero simply creative accounting?
OPINION:
Mike Cranstone, president of Whanganui Federated Farmers, asks the curly question: Is Carbon Zero just creative accounting?
The Climate Change Commission's report makes some daunting recommendations for government policies, but it also berates the current mitigation approach that many businesses are taking.
Significantly, it emphasises that offsetting CO2 emissions by planting pine trees is just shifting the burden to the next generation. It states, "We can't plant our way out of climate change, the focus must be on decarbonising and reducing emissions at source."
David Frame from Victoria University explains the limitations of pine trees.
"A plantation of trees will only sequester carbon from the atmosphere until it reaches maturity, for pine trees at about 40 years. At this point, it is a saturated sink, whereas the CO2 from the burnt fossil fuel will continue warming the planet for 1000 years.
A plantation of trees will only sequester carbon from the atmosphere until it reaches maturity, for pine trees at about 40 years. Photo / Supplied
"The plantation of trees will help the country meet its 2050 zero-carbon target, but to stay at that level we will need to plant another plantation to offset the next 40 years of warming from that original CO2 emission."
Planting pine trees is a short-term band-aid, and the commission recommends that we plant more native forests to create long-term carbon sinks to offset emissions after 2050.
Despite identifying the limitations of planting trees, the report is still calling for 380,000ha of new exotic forest to be planted by 2035, and annually planting a further 25,000ha of native forest till 2050.
That is the equivalent of shutting the gate to almost every hill country farm in the Whanganui, Ruapehu and Gisborne districts. These districts are especially vulnerable, with approximately 80 per cent of their farmed areas being LUC class 6 and 7, land that MPI recommends being more suitable for forestry than pastoral farming.
There is already 6.5 million hectares of native forest in New Zealand, a fifth of this is on privately-owned farmland. A Beef + Lamb NZ study shows that woody vegetation absorbs 90 per cent of the average sheep and beef farm's carbon emissions.
Current national carbon reporting templates do not credit agriculture with this, in fact, all eligible sequestration from native forest is credited to the forestry sector. Natives are a long-term carbon sink, so why should we not count the many years of future sequestration from regenerating native vegetation even though they were existing in 1990?
The report also recommends that the upper limit for the value of carbon be lifted from $50/tonne to $70/tonne immediately. This will create even further distortions in the rural land market, accelerating the sale of good farmland to foreign carbon speculators. Carbon farming only provides a return while the forest is sequestering carbon, for pine trees about 40 years, then the land has minimal market value, similar to an old mine site.
The Government currently prevents overseas investment to purchase farmland but provides an exemption if it is pastoral land being bought to plant trees. Foreign ownership of New Zealand land has always been a sensitive issue; previously an investor had to commit to improving a farm's productivity and its financial and social contribution to the community. The current OIO rules inflict the opposite, denying future generations the use of the land. The saying, "A foreign investor can't take the land away with them," no longer rings true.
The report correctly reiterates that short-lived biogenic methane from livestock does not need to be reduced to zero like the long-lived gases of CO2 and N2O. Unfortunately, when setting the targeted reduction for biogenic methane, the commentary is no longer that agriculture must be responsible for its own warming effect, but that additional reductions in methane are required to provide a cooling effect. This additional reduction to offset the countries rampant fossil fuel emissions. A 10 per cent reduction of methane by 2050 would contribute no additional global warming, but the current target is still set at a range of 24-47 per cent.
What is even more humiliating for agriculture is the 1.34Mt CH4 is multiplied by 25 times to attribute agriculture 47 per cent of NZ's CO2 equivalents. This calculation uses the original GWP metric that was calculated in 1990, the many caveats to its limitations now ignored.
Thirty years of science has gone into developing the modern GWP* metric, but the report does not recommend using it.
There has been no independent economic impact modelling done on this report's recommendations. The report states it will only be 1 per cent GDP, this relies on many vague assumptions. The impact on our export income is what is important, that is what Pharmac relies on to import the latest cancer drugs.
Scuttling the local oil and gas industry, shrinking pastoral agriculture by almost a million hectares, diverting the forestry industry from an export earner to a domestic biofuel seed stock, and the outflow of profits of foreign-owned carbon credits will all severely reduce NZ's balance of trade, and along with it, New Zealanders future standard of living.
So much of this report and the Governments Zero Carbon Policy is about setting policies to make NZ's numbers fit a budget, rather than reducing global warming.
A recent study of the main dairy producers in the world found New Zealand's dairy products had a carbon footprint 48 per cent lower than the average. The carbon intensity of New Zealand lamb has reduced by 32 per cent since 1990. Shifting food production out of New Zealand will increase climate change; as we plant farmland in native scrub, many more hectares of tropical rainforest will be cleared to produce the same amount of food.
There are many more inconsistencies around how New Zealand accounts for its carbon emissions and sequestration. Many of the accounting rules were set in 1990 when the country first signed up to the Kyoto Protocol.
The world has focused three decades of science on understanding climate change. Some carbon stocks or parts of the natural carbon cycle were deemed too hard to measure, so were excluded from eligibility. Maybe we should step back and make sure that the initial accounting assumptions made in 1990 are still accurate, relevant and fair.
Politicians perhaps need to be reminded that their duty is more about enhancing the opportunities and future living standards of kiwis, rather than cultivating their international reputations.
