The carbon conundrum
THE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENCE SOCIETY (EDS) HAS CALLED FOR an urgent reset of New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme “because of the way it is driving a massive expansion of carbon farming across our landscapes”. The price of carbon has now soared to over $60 per tonne.
“Vast swathes of the countryside are being bought up by foreign companies for conversion to large scale pine plantations, principally driven by the increasing price of carbon. This is a perverse and unwanted outcome driven by short-term expediency,” says EDS CEO, Gary Taylor.
“It is important to sequester carbon but it’s also important to continue sustainable farming and food production on suitable land.
“Pine forests provide poor habitat, are a biosecurity and fire risk, produce massive slugs of sediment that pollute rivers, streams and estuaries at harvest, and degrade landscape values at an industrial scale.
“This is a case of climate policy trumping all other considerations. It is a crude and blinkered response to the need for short-term sequestration. We need a home-grown solution to this conundrum. Many of the large-scale conversions are foreign investments whereas most Māori landowners are looking to indigenous forests as the preference.
Responding to this, Forest Owners Association (FOA) President, Phil Taylor, says he would not have expected what amounts to a denial of the significance of climate change from an environmental organisation.
“This ill-informed rant against forestry ignores the threat of climate change. The EDS acknowledges the need to address climate change but then condemns the central role plantation forests must play over the next three decades if we hope to get New Zealand to carbon neutral.
“At the moment, our forests offset a full third of all New Zealand industry and agriculture emissions. As we head to the critical next three decades of the global fight against climate change, our forests will be even more important.
“The complaint about foreign investment in forestry is also misplaced. EDS claims of unspecified ‘vast swathes’ of overseas investment reads as cheap xenophobia.
“Most overseas interests in forestry in New Zealand earn no carbon credits. Forests earn their own way economically.
“Forests are also vital for the developing bio-economy in New Zealand to replace unsustainable use of petrochemical derived products.
“And it can be done over a small area. It’s not ‘swathes’ as EDS would have us believe. The 380,000 extra hectares of new planting the Climate Change Commission envisages would take less than four percent of the current hill country farm estate out of farming – and the least productive farmland at that.”
The EDS’ Gary Taylor points out that biodiversity must also be considered: “To those who say that a robust response to climate change is important, I agree. But we have a biodiversity crisis as well, internationally, and here at home. There are over 4000 native species of plants and animals at risk of extinction. That is another crisis that cannot be ignored.
“There is a win-win here if we are clever enough. Where land is converted to forests, we need to incentivise permanent native forests. They will sequester more carbon over time than exotics, restore lost habitat, lower fire, and biosecurity risks, reduce sediment runoff, and significantly enhance landscape and biodiversity. Native forests are our unique solution.”
In rebuttal, Phil Taylor agrees that the huge challenge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at source is vital “but without fast growing plantation trees filling the carbon gap the task would be politically and technically impossible”.
“Without more exotic forest plantings, farmers would have to severely cut back on their stocking rates to compensate. Their production would fall. Does the EDS want that?”
He says the EDS suggestion to plant more native trees for carbon sequestration may make sense – but only in the long term.
“The climate scientists tell us we need real action now to avoid a runaway catastrophe. We don’t have long enough to wait for native trees to lock up carbon from the atmosphere. Pines and eucalypts do it in years. Even the fastest growing indigenous trees take decades.
“Indigenous forest carbon sequestration hardly registers by 2050. It can only become significant in the 22nd century. To change the Emissions Trading Scheme to favour carbon in native trees, as the EDS wants, flies in the face of science and jeopardises any attempts to get New Zealand to Carbon Zero by 2050”.
He adds that large and small exotic forests harbour substantial intrinsic biodiversity, contrary to the EDS’s claim: “the EDS says it supports farming, while it attacks forestry. The fact is that there is at least as much indigenous habitat in our forests as there is on farmland.”
Gary Taylor suggests a compromise: “To prevent the tragedy of many thousands of hectares being lost to plantation forestry we urgently need joined-up policy solutions that embrace climate, biodiversity and food production imperatives.
“The way to do that is to either adjust the emissions trading scheme (ETS) settings to create a premium price for natives or create a parallel incentive programme to create a hybrid biodiversity and carbon farming package. There is an urgent need to make progress here.
“The final part of a policy shift should be to tighten up the rules governing plantation harvesting. Sediment is our biggest pollutant. Yet our present regulatory settings allow 19th century methods of harvesting: large-scale clear felling when other countries require coupe or compartmental harvesting to reduce environmental impacts. A fix there would require commercial forestry to meet its full environmental costs and responsibilities and further shift the dial towards permanent natives with their vastly superior outcomes,” he says.