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New Zealand Carbon Farming – Speeding With That?


Tony Orman’s Opinion

Last April, I went salmon fishing in a stream that is a tributary of the Wairau River. It is also an important breeding line for both brown trout and perhaps some trout. It is also a habitat for native fish species.

At the road bridge just above its confluence with the mother river, it was just a trickle of water. A few kilometers upstream, it is a dry riverbed, whereas in previous decades the year-round flow was always fresh.

The reason is not difficult to determine.

There used to be salmon fishing and salmon spawning here

The main basin is covered with mature pines and as the trees grow, more and more water is sucked out of the ecosystem.

A 2005 study found that “water runoff from mature pine plantations is about 30% less than from grasslands”. More information indicates that a 12-inch plant will absorb nearly 120 gallons of water per day. It is also recorded that the average pine tree can absorb up to 150 gallons of water per day in the presence of infinite water.

Global warming, also known as Climate Change, has been an important part of recent government policy.

New Zealand is so special.

On the eve of the 2017 election campaign, Labor leader Jacinda Ardern called climate change “my generation’s nuclear-free time”.

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is a tool designed to combat perceived global warming.

In September 2008, New Zealand’s ETS was first codified in the Climate Change (Emissions Trading) Amendment Act 2008 by the 5th Labor Government of New Zealand led by Prime Minister Helen Clark led. Labor was defeated in the election at the end of 2008.

The ETS was subsequently revised in November 2009 and in November 2012 by the New Zealand Fifth National Government headed by Prime Minister John Key.

ETS was then transformed (degenerated) into a free market trading system where carbon credits could be “transferred and disposed of” – in other words, an auction. market for speculators to invest in order to achieve maximum profits and dividends for shareholders.

Environmental considerations such as reduced biodiversity, wild pine forests and depleted river flows are not a concern.

Big business that acknowledges carbon – a driver of climate change – can choose to reduce its carbon footprint at the source, or they can offset it by purchasing carbon credits.

The latter is their preference. That has led to the method of growing trees in bulk, to act as a carbon sink.

Pine trees are the obvious answer from the speculator’s point of view, as they grow quickly – compared to native trees – and quickly reach five meters in height.

Why five meters?

Therein lies the first hint of illogicality.

completely flawed

The basis of ETS is grThe critical shortcoming is that “to qualify as forest land in the ETS, trees in the forest must be species that can reach a height of at least 5 meters.” That’s twice the height of a standard ceiling.

Why five meters?

With native vegetation, about 70 species would be excluded from carbon sequestration assessments. Examples are many species of coprosmas, hoheria, manuka, muehlenbecka, some species of pittosporums and others.

So the basis for ETS is completely illogical and absurdly flawed.

Despite asking in my “letter to the editor”, I still could not determine the reason for the unreasonable exclusion of vegetation below 5 meters in height.

I happened to ask a person from the Ministry of Basic Industry and this person told me it was “an international ruling”.

She meant the United Nations.

Even grass must have a carbon sequestration value?

Farmers often plant trees out of shelter or environmental or aesthetic motives. But the height is less than 5 meters – they do not count. According to ETS, farmers are being unjustly oppressed with costly dire consequences. The dice are loaded according to the impractical 5 meter height rule.

But even returning to the convenient new title of “climate change” there is a glaring gap in its assessment.

Climate change is continuous, dynamic and cyclical – New Zealand has experienced ice ages, for example. In Marlborough, perhaps about 15,000 years ago, the upper and middle reaches of the Wairau River were a glacier that extended down to the confluence of the Branch River. Like the climate naturally warming, glaciers retreat.

Today no glaciers exist in the Wairau Basin due to natural climate change and warming from the Ice Age.

The question is how does natural climate change relate to any anthropogenic change?

Conveniently it seems to be ignored.

equation to solve

So the equation to be solved is Natural Climate Change plus or minus Human-induced climate change is equivalent to actual Climate Change.

To return to the “exotic large scale”, i.e. monoculture of pine. Pine monoculture is an environmental disaster with insatiable thirst depleting streams to dryness, spreading wild pine trees, loss of biodiversity and acidic runoff.

Wilding Pines grow in Marlborough’s Leatham Valley on public land. The Department of Conservation has shown no apparent concern

UK salmon and trout “Conifers are highly effective at capturing and filtering acid so that it flows through the soil and water beneath them,” says the magazine. Therefore, the acid load increases as the plant grows.”

A healthy freshwater ecosystem is often related to an alkaline index (pH). The pH level (acidity level) is important for both benthic fauna and subsequently salmon. If the pH falls below 5.5 (acidity increases) long-term damage to fisheries, both native fish and salmon, will occur.

thirsty pine tree

Then there was the insatiable thirst of the pine tree. A pine tree is said to use 85 liters of water per day while native trees, depending on the species, use significantly less. Water from pine forests with “bare” coniferous forest floor flows faster than typical primary forest areas with shade-loving shrubs. In a word, primary forest has a higher coefficient of water retention resulting in a more consistent, natural flow.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that streams are greatly reduced in flow after pine monocultures have been established. For example, bach owners and residents in the Marlborough Sounds and Northbank of Marlborough’s Wairau Valley have observed similar diminishing flows in the creeks after extensive monoculture pine forests were established.

But planting trees is a way to combat climate change, and a free-market carbon trading system is seen as a way to combat global warming.

CAFCA comes first

Murray Horton of “Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa” (CAFCA) in the latest “Watchdog” publication, December 2022, writes “Preferred Vehicle (for Enterprises) large)—can offset those emissions by buying carbon credits — by planting trees — a lot of trees — to act as a carbon sink.”

“In 2018, the Labor-led coalition government launched a special forestry trial that would allow overseas buyers to purchase sensitive farmland without having to prove it would benefit the country. New Zealand – a requirement when purchasing sensitive land for other purposes. At the end of 2021, according to data provided by Radio NZ, 212,346 hectares were sold to foreign buyers,” wrote Murray Horton.

Countess of Austria

“An Austrian countess bought a sheep farm near Masterton to cultivate carbon converted to pine.

Swedish multinational furniture maker IKEA has won a 5,500-hectare sheep and beef farm in the remote Catlins region while German insurance giant Munich Re has purchased large parcels of land near Gisborne and Southland.”

The fear is that ETS won’t lead to actual emissions reductions – big emitters (polluters) will just plant more trees to meet their ETS obligations rather than reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. fossil material.

As a result, some of New Zealand’s biggest emitters – Air NZ, Contact Energy, Genesis Energy and Z Energy – have formed a company called Dryland Carbon, which also plans to buy 20.00 hectares to reforestation within 5 years. In 2020, it was approved to plant a permanent pine forest of one million trees south of Gisborne.

The Foreign Investment Office has a foreign ownership threshold criterion of 24.9%, but Dryland Carbon’s foreign ownership rate is much higher than its 35% foreign ownership rate.

Always carbon farming is being done by foreign companies.

And with a high carbon price, increasingly speculative carbon farming is wiping out valuable, high-yielding cow and sheep farmlands.

Foreign ownership

Radio NZ in 2019 identified the four largest private landowners in New Zealand as foreign-owned forestry companies.

“Despite some controls on some offshore investments, including a ban on the sale of homes to overseas buyers, the Labor-led government has actively encouraged foreign buy more land for reforestation through a streamlined “special forestry trial.”

Since the Labor coalition government was established in 2017, the Office of Foreign Investment (OIO) has approved more than $2.3 billion in forestry-related land sales – about 31,000 hectares of which formerly belonged to New Zealand.

Even further, foreign ownership in the forestry sector is well established. In 2010, Keith Woodford, Professor of Farm Management and Agribusiness at Lincoln University, wrote about 72% of pine forests being foreign owned, with US companies owning about 35% and companies Asia owns about 12%. He added that recent data are incomplete but foreign ownership appears to have increased further.

Figures for February 2022 from the Office of Foreign Investment (OIO) show that over the past three years, 36,000 hectares of farmland have been approved for sale to foreign investors under a special forestry trial.

Then there’s outdoor recreation. Foreign investors always set up locked gates and refuse to access. It is also understandable because pine forests have a very high fire capacity.

The fault lies in successive governments and disregard for the public interest.

note:

For more information, please refer to the magazine “Northern South” June 2022 https:northand South.co.nz/2202/05/14/you-have-now-entered-carbon-country/

Tony Orman is an agricultural journalist and author, salmon fisherman and conservationist.

A stream bed, which used to flow all year round, is now dried up in the summer by the pine trees behind

Tony Orman

Author, journalist, editor

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