Forestry can stand on its own as a land use
Every part of the primary sector is keenly waiting on how successful their pleadings to the Climate Change Commission will turn out to be.
The dairy industry, for example, is telling the Commission that trying to maintain production with fewer stock just can’t work.
The forest industry is less anxious. It’s main concern is that the Commission anticipated 380,000 hectares of new exotic forest planting by 2035 won’t be achieved. That would leave a carbon reduction shortfall that a government, perhaps in the near future, will than have to impose somewhere else in the economy. That imposition can head in only three directions.
First – buy carbon credits from overseas. Second, squeeze industry. Or, third, cut stock numbers even more. That would seriously imperil the viability and profitability of farming.
Certainly, an additional 380,000 is much more of a modest expansion than the previous scare stories of the past four years. No longer is there a bogey of exotic forests gobbling up nearly six million hectares of hill country farmland by 2075, which was derived from the Productivity Commission afforestation model.
However, if this new area is achieved, then these forests alone will pull a massive 25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of
the atmosphere in 2050 – the Carbon Act deadline for carbon neutrality – albeit that this rate obviously declines markedly at harvest time.
Put that into the context of the latest estimate of total New Zealand gross emissions of 82 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2019. So you can see how
important plantation forestry is to balance the climate change books.
And indeed there are real causes to be optimistic. The cost of alternative sustainable energy generation, solar and wind, is falling rapidly enough to make, for the first time, viable economic sense in its own right.
For farmers contemplating their land use options, things have become a lot more clear.
Forestry can stand on its own feet as a land use, irrespective of carbon credits. It gives farmers an alternative fibre option. Nobody is making farmers plant trees, nor telling them how much of their farm they might like to plant and
when and with what.
But it is clear, that, in aggregate, if exotic forests don’t expand another 380,000 hectares (that is less than five percent of the current sheep and beef farm estate) then the pain of climate change mitigation will return somewhere.