Finn Ross is a PhD candidate and founder of Climate Action Company, from sheep and beef farm Lake Hāwea Station. James Robbie is a sheep and beef farmer from the Tararua region and a passionate advocate for rural communities.
OPINION
Despite election plans to restrictthe conversion of New Zealand’s farmland into exotic pine forests for the purpose of carbon farming, the National-led Government has done the opposite.
Swaths of productive farmland continue to be transformed into what is shaping up to be one of our nation’s largest ecological disasters.
A devastating invasive species, Pinus radiata, is planted on mass in monoculture plantations for carbon credits.
Not only is it destroying farmland and future productivity from New Zealand’s primary sector; it’s diminishing biodiversity, decimating rural communities, increasing fire and disease risk and damaging the sawmilling industry.
It’s very concerning that a recent study found wilding pines are on track to cover 20% of the country by 2030.
Since ousting Labour last year, the new National-led coalition Government has only helped pine carbon farming by; proposing to halve the ETS registration fee, reducing the number of free NZUs supplied to the ETS, and promising stability for the ETS.
While these changes are necessary to maintain New Zealand’s climate commitments, they only enable further pine carbon farming.
With no new regulatory measures issued on the growing number of pine carbon forests across the country, a breaking point is imminent.
Finn Ross of Lake Hāwea Station.
Pine plantations are particularly bad because they plateau in carbon sequestration by 50 years of age, at which point they have limited commercial harvestability, therefore offering no long-term value.
With the current ETS settings, it is now more profitable to leave pines in the ground as opposed to milling, making these pines without a harvest plan simply an exercise in profit over the planet and people.
Why hasn’t the National Government acted on carbon farming?
In our view the Government’s weak climate policies mean they are relying on pines to do the heavy lifting instead of reducing emissions.
It was, however, Labour who allowed for the current settings that have given rise to this unchecked conversion of our rural landscapes.
Whilst the previous government did investigate the possibility of excluding pines from the permanent forest category, the National Māori Forestry Association opposed this because carbon pine forestry could be worth more than $16 billion.
In our view, prioritising profit over the land and people of tomorrow is the worst kind of land stewardship.
National has broken its promise to: “Limit the conversion of productive farmland to forestry for carbon farming purposes to protect local communities and food production”, through its inaction.
Act, which has been vehemently opposed to carbon farms, has also stood strangely passive as more and more ground is lost to the encroaching sea of pines.
Act and National are silent as New Zealand First and Shane Jones drive pine carbon farming.
The key policy change needed is the requirement that all commercial exotic trees need to have a harvest plan, and these plans need to be held to increasingly high environmental standards, just as other industries are so that we can avoid disasters such as those seen during Cyclone Gabrielle last year.
The Government also needs to embrace nature-based solutions that support farmers such as Recloaking Papatūānuku, led by Pure Advantage, which aims to regenerate native forests at scale instead.
Leaving enormous areas of unharvestable exotic trees in the ground for our future generations to grapple with is a devastating burden.
