Wednesday, 13 October 2021, 5:04 pm
Opinion: Ekos
Carbon-farming is a vital climate resilience tool, and
highlighting the risks in the highest risk areas is
scaremongering, Ekos chief executive Dr Sean Weaver
says.
Dr Weaver was responding to a report claiming
land planted for carbon farming will be losing money in 100
years, leaving behind potentially unsellable land covered in
ageing pine, impacting on employment, forestry and
farming.
Ekos is a leader in native carbon forestry.
It grows and protects native forests, and where economically
necessary uses exotic woodlots to fund the native forest
element – because native carbon forestry on its own is
very challenging financially. When using exotics, Ekos
actively transitions the exotic forest to native forest
through systematic small scale harvest and replacement over
several decades.
“This approach is commercially
viable and can be retrofitted into any permanent pine
forestry operations. Then in the long term native timbers
can be sustainably managed to create a permanent revenue
stream,” Weaver said.
“Some have suggested that
carbon farms across the country will all burn down, making
it a waste of time and money. This doesn’t stack up with
the NIWA and Ministry for the Environment climate
projections which show many parts of New Zealand will
actually get wetter,” Weaver says.
“Some regions,
particularly eastern Hawkes Bay and parts of the Gisborne
district are going to get hotter and dryer in coming
decades, but further west and south annual rainfall will
likely increase. But even on the East Coast, forestry can
have a valuable role to play in the region’s economy,
particularly if managed sustainably and in partnership with
local communities.”
Forest insurance premiums would
rise in areas of higher risk, steering some forestry
activities towards lower risk regions, and lower risk forest
types in dryer regions, he says.
“Native forest is
far less fire prone than exotic plantations, making native
reforestation of erosion-prone catchments and waterways a
better option to protect biodiversity and deal with extreme
weather events now and in the future”.
“We work
with farmers to convert steep lands unsuitable for
agriculture to restorative carbon farming,” Weaver said.
“Some East Coast rivers have among the highest
sedimentation rates on the planet, because the erosion lands
upstream simply cannot cope with pastoralism.”
The
way forward was a necessary balance of science, economics,
local knowledge and working together, Weaver
says.
“The reality is that carbon farming is a tool
helping to fund the massive reforestation needed for climate
resilience at little or no cost to the taxpayer. This is
vitally important work. The country needs over a million
hectares of permanent reforestation – costing many
billions of dollars – to prepare for the increased
intensity of ex-tropical cyclones we will see in coming
decades,” Weaver says. “These cyclones promise to wreck
a lot of downstream farms, property and infrastructure
unless we reduce this impact by recloaking the
hills.”
“Fire and wind damage will always be a
threat and no area is immune to risk, but the bigger threat
is climate change and not preparing for what is coming. We
need to make massive emission reductions and grow as many
sustainable and native forests as we can. We need to do this
by working with our farming communities who are on the
climate change front line – they are the ones whose
livelihoods and wellbeing get broken in droughts and
floods,” he says.
The
most common patterns of annual precipitation change
projected between 1995 and 2090. Source: Ministry for the
Environment 2018.
Dr Sean
Weaver is an expert in environmental financing and
indigenous forest carbon markets. He is pioneering
market-based models for sustainable land management in New
Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He has consulted to the
World Bank, African Development Bank, the Pacific Community,
Pacific Island governments, central and local government in
New Zealand, as well as businesses, universities and
community organisations. He is a former Senior Lecturer in
Environmental Studies and Geography at Victoria University
of Wellington and the University of the South Pacific and
has a PhD in
Forestry.
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