Councillor Neil Walker plants eucalypts in emissions trading scheme speculator

Neil Walker is on a mission to find productive and profitable uses for hill country - and store carbon. Photo / File

Neil Walker is going out on a limb in order to get more forest happening.

The Taranaki regional councillor has heard a lot of complaints about the way Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) staff decide which forests can be part of New Zealand's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

He's reacting by taking the risk of planting 25ha of eucalypts on steep slopes he owns in the Waitotara Valley. The risk is that MPI will not allow them into the scheme and he will get no income from the planting.

He wanted assurance before he planted that the forest could be part of the ETS. But MPI Director Spatial, Forestry and Land Management Oliver Hendrickson says that decision will only be made after the forest is planted.

"Under the Climate Change Response Act, MPI can make formal assessments on the eligibility of forest land in the ETS only when it receives a registration application. To be eligible to enter the ETS, the land must already be in forest."

There is nothing in the act that explicitly says that, Mr Walker said.

"Just think how silly that is. It would mean you can't get a building or resource consent for a supermarket before you build it."

Fellow foresters Sid Soulsby and Tom Clarkson have been told their Shellwood Forest in Kauarapaoa Rd, once admitted to the ETS, is 83 per cent ineligible now. The reason given is that a 1993 photo shows shading indicating vegetation other than grass was present before it was planted.

"Nobody disagrees that if land was in forest before 1990 it can't be included in the Emissions Trading Scheme, but MPI boffins have gone much further than that," Mr Walker said.

MPI staff have been looking as hard as they can to find anything that will let them disallow the land, he said.

"That is in my mind ridiculous and unfair. Doesn't Mr Hendrickson know that we have to meet the 2030 Paris targets [to store carbon and offset emissions]?"

Mr Walker sees it as his duty as a community leader to challenge MPI's "obstructionist behaviour" and get change.

"Climate change mitigation is too important for humanity to just sit back and ignore this," he said.