CLEAN & GREEN?

Queenstown Redwood

Of great weight now is the carbon-offsetting value of New Zealand’s plantation forests. Pine trees are like giant self-expanding straws that we poke vertically into the ground and they merrily suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for 30 years. They literally suck it straight into their trunks which end up towering sky-wards as space-efficient storage vessels for that nasty carbon. Even Discovery Channel would be challenged to come up with a better engineering solution for global warming.

New Zealand has been planting trees on a large scale for a century already and is a world leader in the technology.

The planted forest technology for radiata pine is probably the most advanced of any potential tree species. The evolution and success of radiata pine in New Zealand has major implications and lessons for the rest of the world.

says, Winkie Sutton. For example, New Zealand’s plantation forests enable us to be one of the few OECD nations able to provide significant offsets for carbon emission increases.

The offset of our emissions increases was reconfirmed by satellite mapping of recent tree plantings. Climate Change Minister Nick Smith said

the Government has been cautious over New Zealand’s Kyoto balance and future targets because of the billion dollar plus variations each year in the estimates of forest areas. This satellite data is good news in that it accurately confirms the area of post-1989 forests as sufficient to offset New Zealand’s increase in emissions and meet our Kyoto obligations in the first commitment period from 2008-2012.

But then there are the inevitable critics. Usually those who are jealous that they haven’t, or can’t, deploy New Zealand’s leading solutions to environmental management. For example

but many think this <afforestation carbon offset> is a bit of a cheat that is not sustainable in the long term – especially because much of our pine plantations are due for harvest around 2020. (New Zealand Herald)

Excuse me, when we harvest them, we can replant them. New Zealand foresters have been doing this in scale for a century already. Just because we’re leading, don’t accuse us of cheating.

Some people are concerned that planting trees is not a sustainable answer to climate change because, whilst we have a lot of land, it is finite. But for this same reason, growth in dairying, New Zealand`s main source of green house gas emissions, can’t continue indefinitely either. As long as we balance growth in agriculture with growth in forestry, and manage our population, we should be able to hold our carbon balance. And we have about one million hectares of erosion prone land available for new tree planting. Of course, by concurrently making emissions reductions through improved transport and energy use, we can be an active contributor to global net reductions in green house gasses.

The critical issue here though is economic. Our economy is dependent on land-based industries. Our supply of land is a finite. Therefore our long-term economic growth has to be based on higher value products. A Green Brand New Zealand Strategy will be critical to that.

15 years ago my wife and I paid to have Kyoto-qualifying pine trees planted on about 10 hectares of hilly, marginal, unproductive, and largely naked farm land in back-country Hawkes Bay. This is our family’s contribution to New Zealand’s 556,000 hectares of Kyoto Forests – those newly planted since 1990. The 3,000 trees left on our 10 hectares after some thinning and tending have already sucked in and locked up about 5,000 tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide. That will double over the remaining 15 years or so until we have them harvested, and replant so the whole thing goes around again for our kids and their families. Our family is well and truly in carbon credit. Is yours?

When we harvest, the extracted timber, which is 50% solid carbon, will be treated and used in building, furniture, etc – locking up what otherwise would have been atmospheric carbon for a long time. But this locking up in processed timber is yet to be formally recognised in global treaties. The New Zealand team to the Copenhagen negotiations have as an objective to obtain recognition for the long-term locking up of carbon in processed timber from plantations. Prime Minister Key says they will seek agreement for 70% of the carbon credits given to a mature stand of trees to be retained post-harvest in the timber.  They will also seek changes to the LULUCF rules (Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry) to allow more flexibility in the felling and replanting of trees in different areas. We wish them good LUUUCK.