The NZ Government should underwrite the growing of millions of forestry seedlings if it wants to meet its climate change planting goal. Current planting levels are far below the 30,000ha of new forest a year for 10 years needed to meet the country’s greenhouse gas emissions target. Four thousand hectares were planted last year and just 2000ha the year before.
EITG director and long-time forestry investor Richard Hayes says that there simply isn’t the confidence in the industry to encourage the necessary level of new planting, and nurseries are reluctant to carry the cost of bringing on enough trees. “We need millions of seedlings coming on, but the nurseries have already been burnt with one outfit saying they were going to plant a lot of carbon forests and then falling over, and don’t want to take the financial risk,” he told Carbon News.
Having the Government underwrite the risk of a massive increase in seedling production by promising to buy any unsold seedlings would give the nurseries the confidence they need to get the trees started, he says. The Government could then sell as new forests were planted, or grow them on for another year.
Forest Owners’ Association chief executive David Rhodes says the idea has merit. His organisation is also worried about the low level of planting, and has approached the Government with ideas to tackle the problem. “We have proposed two things, both of which were in the proposal for the Australian CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme),” he said.
The first is a system of averaging the carbon units forest owners would receive over the life of the forest to take away the risk of being caught without enough credits to cover liabilities at harvest time. The association also wants the Government to underwrite the risk of large tracts of forest being destroyed in a major disaster, leaving forest owners liable for millions of dollars of lost carbon storage. The scheme would work in a similar way to the Earthquake and War Damages Commission, with the Government building up a pool of carbon credits by collecting a small number from each forest owner each year, Rhodes said.
