Submission on Te Ara Whakahow Ahumahi Ngahere Draft Industry Transformation Plan
Federated Farmers supports the plan’s aspirational vision for the forestry and wood processing sector. This vision is ‘The forestry and wood processing sector generates more value for New Zealand, is a key pillar of our regional communities, and underpins New Zealand’s low-emissions economy.”
Federated Farmers supports increasing the integration of trees on farms under the principle of planting the ‘right tree in the right place for the right purpose’. Unfortunately, current policy in New Zealand does not encourage the upholding of this often repeated principle. New Zealand policy settings are artificially incentivising the runaway blanket afforestation of productive sheep and beef farms with a monoculture of pine trees. This afforestation is already having a negative impact on many rural communities, with the recent spike in forestry resulting in less local economic activity and fewer sustainable employment opportunities – an ongoing unplanned, unsustainable and unintended ‘transformation’.
Current policy settings for the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are also having harmful impacts on wood processing. Current ETS policy settings effectively make all forestry registered into the ETS carbon forestry, discouraging the harvesting of forests and reducing the supply of wood. The overwhelming profitability of carbon credits is also sending a signal for forest companies to not invest in silviculture, as it is increasingly profitable to increase the number of carbon credits a forest accumulates at the cost of wood quality.
We are pleased that the plan acknowledges that farmers are a major stakeholder in the New Zealand forestry sector. Many of our farming members take great care to integrate vegetation into their farming systems, often at a great time and financial commitment.
Increasing vegetation in farming systems has the potential to deliver a wide variety of benefits such as providing shelter to livestock, providing a short-term feed source for livestock during drought, improving biodiversity outcomes, and improving water quality outcomes. However, many farmers are integrating the right trees into the right places on their farms in spite of (and not with the assistance of) central government policies ‘The right tree in the right place for the right purpose’ seems to mean ‘pine trees, anywhere for carbon credits’.
communities and the potential for these plantations to harbour pest animals and tree diseases.
It is concerning that the plan does not address the growing amount of international evidence that challenges New Zealand’s exotic forestry emission offsetting regime. The New Zealand Government's climate change strategy relies on two very problematic tools: offsetting emissions by purchasing currently non-existent international carbon credits, and offsetting emissions by incentivising increasing rates of blanket exotic monocultural afforestation domestically. International offsets are problematic as they do not, and may never, exist. Domestic blanket exotic forestry offsets are problematic as they increasingly contradict international sustainability expectations. As noted by Dame Anne Salmond:
“It is now beyond doubt that New Zealand’s primary strategy for tackling climate change - offsetting through the Emissions Trading Scheme, with the financial incentives it gives to the large-scale planting of monocultures of exotic pine trees - runs in the opposite direction to international scientific advice.
In the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6) report, for instance, released yesterday, the practice of “planting large scale non-native monocultures, which would lead to loss of biodiversity and poor climate change resilience” was placed among the ‘Worst Practices and Negative Adaptation Trade-offs’ for temperate forests”
The plan states “Work is needed to help people understand the benefits of forestry and wood processing, how the sector works, and the value of its products.”. Federated Farmers and our farming members who live in rural communities understand the forestry and wood processing industry perfectly well. Meaningful structural policy change is needed to restore the forestry sector's social licence to operate, not a public relations campaign. The Gisborne Wairoa regions are examples of where our members understand the impacts of the forestry sector particularly well.
Click opposite to view the full submission
Contact:
Macauley Jones
Policy Advisor
[email protected]