The recent Innovatek Environmental Forestry Conference highlighted both old and new environmental challenges faced by the forestry industry, from pest control to the impact, benefits and value of long term forestry experiments.
Pre-conference, there was a morning workshop looking at recent regulatory changes.
To start the conference proper, James Newman’s keynote address covered last year’s Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) report, Alt-F Reset: Examining the drivers in New Zealand forestry. Mr Newman is a senior advisor at the PCE which was established to provide independent, high quality advice about environmental matters. He said its independence is a key strength, but it can only make recommendations and has no rule-making power. The current commissioner is Simon Upton.
As well as recapping the report, Mr Newman also touched on what has happened since, including linking the report to other forestry and wider land-use related work of the PCE.
While one focus of the report is examining whether it is possible to create new native forests at scale, the commissioner has stressed the report was not anti-production pine.
In the report’s introduction, the commissioner said: “Sited appropriately and managed well, it provides a sound economic return and local employment in growing, managing and processing the trees for domestic and export markets. Production forestry continues to generate revenue and economic benefit long after any carbon dividend has been spent.” The report, however, is not intended to focus on production pine.
“We know how to make money from radiata pine, but we know far less about how to grow alternative forests, including native ones, for carbon or timber production,” said Mr Newman.
One of the key messages of the report is that native afforestation at scale is typically challenging and expensive.
Mr Newman said, in the commissioner’s view, there needs to be a conversation “about what we want from our forest estate and how to get it”.
“That’s why he called for ‘a level of cross-party agreement on the broad stokes of forest policy, including the degree to which the diversification of the forest estate is desirable, and what will be needed to achieve that’.”
The first recommendation of the report was to reform the New Zealand ETS to phase out forestry offsets for fossil fuel emissions.
“There is no illusion that would be easy – it’s a difficult and controversial recommendation that would require a lot of policy work for it to happen,” said Mr Newman.
The commission is due to release a report focused entirely on the ETS later this year.
Other conference presentations included the challenges faced in delivering quality pest control that actually works, by Backblocks Environmental Management’s John Bissell and a case study focusing on Houpoto Forest and discussing managing an un-harvestable stand back to native forest, by Manulife’s Environmental Manager Sally Strang.
For more on the conference, see the May edition of NZ Logger, on sale on 4 May. Check the link on this page to subscribe to either a printed or digital copy (or both).
