Among the 28 are plans for Overlay 3B – a process under the Tairāwhiti Resource Management Plan in which the region’s worst eroding pastoral farming and plantation forestry land would be planted with permanent vegetation cover.
What will this look like?
Gisborne District Council has used a range of modelling and land assessment methods, including land susceptibility and connectivity modelling and active gully erosion assessments, to identify what could be Overlay 3B sections.
Soil conservation team leader Kerry Hudson said the models had been done by Landcare Research, with the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and scientist Dr Mike Marden recently updating the information.
Hudson said there were anomalies with it.
“No model is perfect, but this one really is pretty good.”
Showing an image of a gully planted in vegetation, Hudson explained how Overlay 3B could work for farming.
“The picture we have here [is] there are still 300 cows in that paddock; they are all sheltering. It’s the vegetation we are after. We are still getting better productivity there as opposed to if we never planted it because [back] then we had erosion ... we’ve controlled the erosion.”
Hudson said farming case studies were the best examples of Overlay 3B.
“That [farmer] is getting a very high level of primary production. He’s got shade, shelter and he can claim carbon credits on the trees ... so he is losing nothing.”
He also pointed to natural regeneration in the image.
“Where we’ve got scrub regenerating, that’s just natural regeneration ... the stock are not getting that much feed off it. They’re getting better feed elsewhere. He stopped putting fertiliser on it ... and no one comes and chops that down every 30 years.”
An example of landslide susceptibility when it comes to forestry is seen on the gully on the right-hand side of both images below.
The red and orange show areas where erosion has the potential to impact waterways.
The image on the left shows that the area is covered in forestry.
“When that is harvested we would anticipate retreating to the edge of where we have red and gold,” Hudson said.
“What we are finding in a lot of those areas is the trees are not high-quality. We’ve had some erosion in there before and the logging costs are high ... so we’re not losing too much overall.”
Another example Hudson showed was two images of a plantation forest in 2017 that was ready for harvest.
This image shows very little growing in the gully.
“You can see the big green gap is where nothing grew ... and that’s the area we want [planted] in something permanent. We need to persevere with a range of species other than pinus radiata over time.
“That never happened. When the forestry schemes came along, they were one-off plantings of radiata.”
Hudson said if you looked at the modelling colours that signalled where permanent vegetation will be, very little forestry production was lost, as very little was naturally growing there in the first place.
“Some exotic species may be the answer, with indigenous coming through over time.”
Another aspect to take into account was that it was an active gully.
“The more erosion we get, the more we get slips on the side of it ... so we’re improving everything.
“We’re significantly reducing the amount of sediment.”
The council’s principal policy adviser, Janic Slupski, said overall there were “roughly 60,000 hectares” of areas that would be considered Overlay 3B across the region.
Signalled changes to forestry
When asked whether the council was concerned about the signalled government changes to the National Environmental Standards for Commercial Forestry (NES-CF), which could remove councils' ability to make their own regulations, Slupski said they were keeping communications with MPI “wide open”.
“We have the best understanding of this region, and it is not the same as other regions, it’s different. So we need to have that avenue to design a regulatory framework which fits into that regional context.”
Speaking with Local Democracy Reporting (LDR), Gisborne District Council sustainable futures director Jo Noble said the council had spent $78,544 on identifying and researching Overlay 3B land, which came from the council’s budget.
“Council will need to consider its options if the pathway to establishing regionally specific rules is closed.
“It currently remains optimistic that this discretion for Gisborne District Council is retained to ensure appropriate environmental outcomes for forestry activities are achieved,” she said.
Speaking previously with LDR, she said there was a need for some form of regulatory framework, rather than reliance on voluntary approaches for land use adaptation.
According to the report, Gisborne has 25% of the North Island’s most severely eroding land.
How council might transition? The Transition Advisory Group
The Transition Advisory Group was formed to help with the transition of land.
It includes forestry owners, farmers, the council’s chief executive and staff, MPI representatives and Māori landowners.
Its purpose “is to enable local expertise and knowledge to inform council in identifying options to transition (Overlay 3B) land (along with any other land to be voluntarily retired) from existing land purposes to permanent vegetation cover”, the report says.
“The transition guidance is being drafted for a 10-year timeframe, assuming that this is reasonable and realistic for the practical transition work but recognising there are other considerations (such as funding and financing) that will influence implementation.”
During the meeting, councillor Tony Robinson asked whether other regions were creating similar work programmes.
“We are it,” Stoltz said. “They will learn from us.”
