The key to survival
How felling some of our native forests makes solid ecological sense
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 220 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
At first, the ‘‘gift’’ seemed like a cruel joke. Having relieved Ma¯ ori of their land by various, often dubious, methods, the Crown relented and gave thousands of Nga¯ i Tahu a random 50ha chunk of the South Island each.
Much of it was unfarmable, and miles from anywhere, recalls Mike Gibbs, whose greatgrandfather was one of the recipients. His family hiked to see their new land, and despaired. ‘‘It was such marginal land, nothing could be done with it,’’ says Gibbs. So it sat there, covered in ancient trees.
In the 1960s, Gibbs’ nana banded together with others and formed an incorporation managing 1300ha near Te Waewae Bay in Southland. They still couldn’t really develop the land, because banks wouldn’t lend to collective owners. So the trees stayed. ‘‘As a kid, I remember going down there and it was the Wild West, wild cattle and a bit of bush,’’ says Gibbs.
Now, the world is grateful for that missed opportunity. While half the world’s forests have been cleared by people, what is left represents a staggering store of carbon. New Zealand’s mature native forests alone still hold 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – equal to 86 years’ worth of the whole country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Our old-growth temperate forests – along with similar forests in Chile, Tasmania, southeastern Australia and northwestern North America – are among the world’s densest natural carbon stores, according to a recent article in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
The paper’s 16 international authors listed New Zealand’s forests among the most significant stashes of carbon that need urgent protection if the world is to have any hope of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2C.
Globally, it’s been estimated saving old forests from further damage and degradation is even more crucial to halting climate change than planting new trees. That’s because new trees will take centuries to reach the same level of carbon storage. Typically, New Zealand’s mature indigenous forests hold twice as much carbon per hectare as tree plantations, and more too, than younger regenerating native forests. They also cover much more of the country, so any mis-steps can have an amplified impact.
Yet these stocks are not necessarily all safe. While most mature forest is in public ownership, and cared for using taxpayer money, things are more complex for the roughly 18 per cent of New Zealand’s native forest that is privately owned.
Forestry consultant Adam Forbes realised the scale of the problem when he was surveying an 80ha block in the King Country.
From above, the old forest looked lush and healthy, but it was hiding its bedraggled underskirts. ‘‘The canopy was beautiful,’’ says Forbes, ‘‘but the understorey was absolutely threadbare.’’
‘‘It struck me that, unless these forests are looked after, they aren’t going to replace themselves.’’
Forbes, a forestry graduate, helps landowners all over New Zealand regenerate their native
forests. He sees the same pattern in many places. Younger trees are ravaged by uncontrolled stock, deer and other invaders, while the old trees stay intact. Everything looks fine from a distance, but decades or centuries from now, there’ll be nothing to replace the forest giants when they die of age, he says.
‘‘If the trees died in the next half an hour, everyone would be all over it,’’ says Forbes. ‘‘Yet because our native trees can live for hundreds of years, you can abuse the forest and it’s not apparent,’’ he says. ‘‘There are hundreds or thousands of forest stands out there that are at risk.’’
The stakes are high. Even in its damaged state, that threadbare 80ha block in the King Country was holding about 200 tonnes of carbon in every hectare, Forbes estimated – equal to roughly 740 tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be in the atmosphere. That represents almost as much greenhouse gas as a medium family car would produce in 150 years, tucked up in every hectare of trees.
Those trees are now protected: the owner has retired the land from farming, and booted out the stock that were devastating the undergrowth. But many landowners can’t afford to do that, or don’t want to shoulder the cost, says Forbes.
‘‘I completely get it. It comes down to money – they are business people running a business,’’ he says. ‘‘Often this is marginal land. I’ve heard of $2000 a day for a bulldozer on a steep site, plus fencing costs. Hunting contracts cost more in remote areas. There needs to be support.’’
Forbes says many landowners he sees aren’t eligible for grants that would cover the costs of defending their forests. While subsidies are sometimes available for fencing and pest control, some forests fall through the funding cracks.
But there is one obvious way to pay for a forest’s upkeep: fell some of it. Clear-felling old native forest is prohibited by the Forests Act, but selective logging is allowed in places, so long as it’s sustainable in the opinion of the Ministry for Primary Industries.
About a third of New Zealand’s privately owned native forest is suitable for selective logging, according to MPI. MPI says encouraging logging is not its policy. Still, a document on the website of the MPI-run treeplanting agency, Te Uru Ra¯ kau, notes that selective milling is one way for owners to pay for costs of upkeep, such as weed and pest control. (‘‘Learn how some private forest owners are maximising the value of their indigenous forests,’’ invites the agency).
It’s a difficult choice for landowners like Gibbs, who need income, but don’t want to cut their trees down.
‘‘You have this beautiful forest resource, but it’s very hard to be remunerated for that,’’ says Gibbs. Just around the corner from his land, the neighbours are selectively logging their old forest for beech and mataı¯.
So when someone offered another way, the shareholders jumped at it.
It was conservationist-turned-carbon trader Sean Weaver who brokered the deal that would let them earn an income from protecting their trees. Weaver worked with Te Puni Ko¯ kiri and another researcher to pioneer a carbon credit that could be sold on the voluntary market, separately from the Emissions Trading Scheme, hoping it would serve as a model for similar schemes.
Taking the concept to other forests has proved almost impossible, however.
In the fight against climate change, it’s become routine for rich countries (Norway) to pay poorer ones (Indonesia) to preserve their old-growth forests for climate reasons. The deals recognise that people in Western countries have often developed huge agricultural sectors by cutting forests down – and now they want developing countries to stop following their footsteps. In the private sphere, companies sometimes offer payments for conservation projects directly. In New Zealand, though, the law makes it difficult to offer those kinds of payments via the carbon market.
Firstly, getting approval to sell a private carbon credit – one listed with a scheme in New York, in this case – was an experience Weaver describes as being ‘‘like shaving your head with a really expensive cheese grater’’.
Weaver had to prove that what the landowners were doing – forfeiting their logging rights, and agreeing to protect the forest from pests and predators – would not be double-counted towards New Zealand’s domestic carbon savings. He also had to prove that the carbon saving was both genuine and measurable – something that’s tricky to prove with pest control, but easier when someone has clear rights to log a forest.
It would have been easier to sell the credits under the Emissions Trading Scheme, an established and government-sanctioned market, but that wasn’t an option.
Mature native forests are not eligible for carbon credits under the ETS, which only recognises native forests planted after 1990. Working in the private market, ‘‘the due diligence you have to do is orders of magnitude greater,’’ says Weaver.
Despite the cheese-grater-esque experience, Weaver would be willing to undertake more schemes in the voluntary market, now that he’s succeeded once. But he can’t do that right now, either.
He needs a certificate from MPI saying the credits won’t be counted elsewhere towards New Zealand’s total emissions tallies, and the government can’t give him that assurance until planned changes to the ETS are finalised. Climate Change Minister James Shaw says Covid-19 means that process might take longer than planned.
Yet the benefits of these schemes can be real. Weaver estimated that every year Gibbs’ group forgoes logging, it saves 2458 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released to the atmosphere. The carbon credits were purchased by Qantas, Les Mills and other companies, who wanted to reduce their impact by more than the legally-required minimum provided for in the ETS. The money is used for pest control, weed control and education and training scholarships for young shareholders in the forest, says Gibbs.
‘‘It’s a compensatory payment,’’ says Weaver. ‘‘It’s not heaps, but enough to make that decision not to log and lock up that land in perpetuity.’’
Gibbs estimates that, in his area alone, there is up to 35,000ha of Ma¯ ori-owned land that could benefit from selling carbon credits. Weaver says demand from buyers outstrips supply.
But those in the queue will have to wait. In the North Island, near Lake Taupo¯ , land manager Wally Kingi would love to do what Gibbs has done.
Kingi is the chair of Tu¯ wharetoa Collective Incorporated, a society of 14 Nga¯ ti Tu¯ wharetoa farming entities with a combined 26,000 shareholders and land covering 32,000 ha.
Many of the collective’s newer members own blocks that are 100 per cent forested, with no farming or other source of revenue, says Kingi. The trees were once logged but are now almost a century old, so are not eligible to be counted under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
‘‘It’s very difficult,’’ says Kingi. ‘‘There are funding programmes we can tap for pest management. But no income,’’ he says. ‘‘We have a lot of people dependent on what we do. They want to see a dividend at the end of the year.
‘‘We can’t get carbon credits under the ETS because the government has said indigenous forests don’t meet the criteria. What Sean (Weaver) has done is find a way to do it through the voluntary carbon market, which is a very tortuous route to take and compliance-heavy.
‘‘It just annoys the s... out of us. The costs of keeping those areas untouched has all been privatised to us, and the benefits have been socialised to everybody.’’
‘‘You have this beautiful forest resource, but it’s very hard to be remunerated for that.’’ Mike Gibbs
The simplest way to explain why old forests are largely invisible to carbon policy, is that it’s age discrimination. There’s no magic to the year 1990, other than it’s been the starting point for carbon accounting rules because it’s the year of the Kyoto Protocol.
While the climate doesn’t care what year a tree began its life, carbon stores locked away in ancient native forests barely figure in our climate policies.
Natural forests are largely excluded from New Zealand’s international emissions targets, says the Ministry for the Environment.
As well as being excluded from our emissions targets and the ETS, mature native forests aren’t supported by the government’s flagship One Billion Trees programme, which aims to foster swathes of new planting.
From an accounting perspective, the focus on youth before maturity makes sense: new forests hoover lots of carbon as they grow, so they’re good for New Zealand’s official emissions tallies. Growth in new forests is easier to measure, and it can be used to offset our driving, eating and flying emissions.
By contrast, old-growth forests are assumed to be breathing in about the same amount of carbon dioxide as they’re exhaling. They’re guardians of stores that were sequestered hundreds of years ago, but they aren’t shifting the official balance sheet.
But that doesn’t mean all long-stored carbon is safe, nor that it couldn’t be increased by good management.
A long-term study from 2002 to 2014 found New Zealand’s old growth forests were carbon neutral, but 18 per cent of them showed signs of disturbance – either shrinking in area or showing a declining average tree size. Long-term, the authors expected there might be a decline in biomass, which means less carbon.
These issues can affect trees on public land too, despite its healthier stream of funding.
In 2015, the Department of Conservation got scientists at Landcare Research to estimate how much carbon could be gained by better pest control in the vast conservation estate. (DOC-managed forests are not in the ETS and don’t earn carbon credits, following a 2010 decision by the government).
The researchers found conservation land could store almost 700 million tonnes of additional carbon dioxide (equivalent to almost nine years’ worth of New Zealand’s emissions) through a mix of reforesting cleared land, helping shrublands
‘‘We have this massive carbon store just sitting in vegetation that completely belittles what we play around with with our petrol and things. A small difference in how we manage those natural systems can have a huge impact.’’
Kevin Hackwell, right
Forest and Bird advocacy manager
regenerate, and letting existing mature forests recover from animal over-browsing. Controlling wild animals would help with all of these goals, the authors noted.
And while it would be harder to quantify the small gains from pest control made over huge existing forests than to track the newer forests, the gains would still very likely be real.
If the department wanted to claim carbon credits, the authors said, it could probably do so for up to 99 million tonnes of the newly-sucked greenhouse gases.
‘‘Given that conservation land represents the largest land area in New Zealand under a single manager, DOC’s management of carbon is critical for New Zealand,’’ they concluded.
Forest and Bird’s Kevin Hackwell could not agree more. His organisation has lobbied for the government to increase DOC’s funding, to recognise its role as a carbon caretaker. By his reckoning, the value of carbon on public land exceeds $20b.
‘‘We have this massive carbon store just sitting in vegetation that completely belittles what we play around with with our petrol and things,’’ says Hackwell.
‘‘A small difference in how we manage those natural systems can have a huge impact.’’
One general rule of emissions accounting globally is that nations don’t get credit for things they did not do purposely to help the climate – like having forests in their borders that established themselves centuries ago. On the flipside, countries aren’t penalised for emissions beyond their control, like wildfire or a volcanic eruption.
But natural systems hold so much carbon that you can’t simply fail to count them, says Hackwell. Excluding them leaves too little incentive to care for the carbon stocks that we have.
‘‘At some point in the next 10-20 years, the world will have to go to full carbon accounting, or we will get perverse outcomes. We may do something good but it is drowned out by a failure to protect something else. It’s nuts that we don’t count the whole system,’’ he says.
There are potential snags, though. One reason that soil carbon – an even bigger natural store than forests – does not yet qualify for carbon credits is a fear that a drought could wipe out carbon and leave those who’d claimed credits liable.
Similar issues could arise, say, if trees were decimated by kauri dieback, under full accounting. One way through the obstacles is to reward landowners who adopt climate-friendly practices, even if something goes accidentally wrong.
Forbes believes there must be a way to give landowners a small reward for managing carbon on their land.
After all, the climate doesn’t care whether or not a tree was registered for carbon credits – only that the wood is felled or rotting. ‘‘Just because it’s hard – just because we might get a bill or it’s difficult – doesn’t mean we should not do it.’’