Friday, 15 October 2021, 8:57 am
Press Release: NZ Forest Owners’ Association
The Forest Owners Association is saying that foresters’
intentions to plant more trees is an immediate and practical
insurance against New Zealand not achieving greenhouse gas
reduction goals.
The Association President, Phil
Taylor, says the reaction to the Ministry for the
Environment’s just released consultation document shows
even the short-term greenhouse gas reduction targets are not
going to be met.
“It is just as well that MfE can
then cite a survey of landowners and forest managers’
intentions to plant larger areas of trees, than the 380,000
hectares of plantation exotics by 2035, which was
anticipated by the Climate Change Commission at the
beginning of the year.”
“MfE now estimates that
the price of carbon, under the Emissions Trading Scheme,
will result in between 806,000 and 1,370,000 hectares being
planted, a mix of exotics and indigenous, on a longer
time-scale to 2050.”
“MfE is stating in its
document that ‘forestry could sequester between 18 and 32
million tonnes of CO2’ in the year 2050.
“That is
a huge volume. You can see this amount in the context of New
Zealand’s current total yearly gross emissions running at
82 million tonnes COe,” Phil Taylor says.
But
Phil Taylor says the forest industry continues to doubt
whether even the more modest level of planting will
occur.
“New forests will occupy less than four
percent of the sheep and beef estate, but it still requires
25,000 hectares of planting to be maintained year in and
year out for the next 15 years.”
“Already, nursery
stock is short, and some of the planting will also be needed
in the calculations for offsetting methane and nitrous oxide
emissions on farm.”
He also says the MfE report is
right to highlight the post-forest benefits of wood material
in combating climate change.
“For instance, MfE says
that just the wood residues from harvesting existing forests
could replace 70 per cent of aviation fuel usage. There’s
also the dairy industry rapidly converting its coal fuelled
boilers over to using wood fuel.”
Phil Taylor says
the report is being realistic about the cost of planting
indigenous trees. MfE states that establishing a hectare of
native trees could cost up to $50,000 per hectare, whereas
pine tree establishment costs up to $2,500 per hectare.
Native trees are also much slower at storing appreciable
amounts of carbon.
“If I have one technical issue
with the forestry side of the MfE report, it’s that there
is some idea that planting forests over the next few years
will result in increased carbon emissions.”
“That
can’t be right. The soil is not cultivated. It’s not a
machine process. A planter will cut a standard single slit
into the ground, put that tree in, and that’s it. You
wouldn’t be able to measure the amount of carbon emission
which comes from
that.”
