Planting the seeds of a solution

01-08-2010 | Denis Hocking

It is hard to escape debate and argument about the ETS at the moment.

Most of it is hostile, with just the odd item pointing out some of the opportunities it offers to many owners of harder hill country. What is missing is any real discussion of the bigger picture - the overall objective of the ETS? Is this objective justified? Are there other ways of meeting this objective? And what else might be achieved along the way?

The objective of the ETS is simple. To send price signals to consumers and industry to change their habits so that they will emit less greenhouse gas. This, in turn, should allow New Zealand to come closer to meeting its Kyoto Protocol commitments.

A trading system is regarded as a more efficient way than a simple tax because it allows more flexibility in finding ways of reducing emissions. One could be thinking, after listening to politicians of all hues, that the aim of the ETS is a price rise that will be offset by whatever, so nobody has to change any habits.

Is the objective justified? Well I guess that depends on whether you are a climate change believer or a doubter. Just note that despite the doubter's promise of cooling in recent years, we have just had the warmest 12 months globally on record. I am a believer.

The ETS in its current form has some serious shortcomings. One is the political decisionmaking behind allocating units to various sectors, a weakness well covered by Adolf Stroombergen in The Dominion Post on July 10 (ETS murky when it comes to free emission permits). The example that irritates me the most is that steel and concrete are having to account for only 20% of their considerable carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, they may be "trade-exposed" industries, but the Government is subsidising these emission-intensive materials and thus encouraging consumers to use them in preference to low-emission timber.

There is no denying the ETS doesn't work well for agriculture. Muting the main culprit here, rumen methane, is not yet a realistic response and may not be in the future, but nitrification inhibitors and strategic tree planting certainly are.

Equally problematic, in my opinion, has been the decision to make the agricultural ETS a simple tax via the processor so that the farmer will not have a direct incentive to reduce emissions. On the other hand I can understand the reluctance to make 30,000-40,000 largely uncooperative farmers the point of obligation.

So there are some serious questions about ETS, but equally, there are also some big options available for rural NZ that could counter our emissions for quite some time while delivering other benefits. It is all to do with getting forest cover on to that eroding hill country that needs forest cover anyway.

Why does it need forest cover? To counter the accelerated erosion under pasture. Not only does this erosion remove the topsoil from the hill slopes where it belongs, but it clogs the lower reaches of many of our rivers as they flow across the flood plains that contain our most productive food-producing land.

A case I am familiar with is the Oroua River that flows across top dairy and arable country south of Feilding. Erosion in mid-catchment has resulted in the lower reaches aggrading and losing capacity much faster than the river engineers expected. Engineering solutions are becoming technically much more demanding, the costs are increasing exponentially, and the threat of failure is still rising. There are numerous other such examples.

So I do not accept that afforesting this eroding hill country threatens our agricultural production. Just the reverse - it would help protect our most productive land. In addition, the experience of farm foresters is that you can put a lot of trees into hill country, or the sand country in my case, before you seriously affect livestock production, provided you plant the appropriate, low productivity, unstable land. Claims to the contrary by Federated Farmers just demonstrate a lack of experience with farm forestry.

No one is advocating blanket afforestation of all our hill country, but Landcare scientists have long said at least another million hectares definitely, and urgently, needs forest cover.

Most of this is low-productivity land, often being farmed at a loss under pasture. Some has the potential to be production forest, other areas will be too inacessible or incapable of carrying sufficient volume for timber production. Not all will be Kyoto-compliant land, ie, eligible for formal carbon credits, because it was technically "forest" in 1990.

But the numbers are interesting. One million hectares of average productivity forest could sequester around 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. And 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide just happens to approximate our total, annual agricultural emissions. In addition, a significant portion of the 600,000 hectares of 1990 plantings are on farms.

Tree planting is not a permanent solution, and you would need to consider how much of the carbon was claimed for offsetting, but such an approach could achieve bigger reductions in net agricultural emissions than the ETS plans through to the middle of the century.

I would also see other benefits. As I have argued so often, in an energy and carbon-constrained world, wood has to be a resource of choice for structural and biofuel uses. It is low energy, absorbs carbon dioxide, nutrient efficient, thrives on poorer land, can be stored on stump, etc, etc. An increased wood resource should be a real advantage in a post-peak oil, carbon-constrained world.

There is also another potential benefit: It might give a bit more credibility to our "clean, green New Zealand" claims.

If we are to take full advantage of these possibilities, it is this generation of landowners that needs to be taking action. Yes, there are "carbon farmers", often foreign-based, looking at our land but they are not interested in the highly erosion-prone land. I gather that at the recent NZ Institute of Forestry conference they expressed the view that land already devoid of much of its topsoil is not going to be sufficiently productive to interest them. We need to do this job ourselves.

So perhaps there is a case for dropping the ETS on agriculture, but in exchange for a vigorous afforestation programme, supported in spirit and substance by farmers. This is the big picture.

The afforestation grant scheme was a small step in this direction, but it has now been cut off at the knees and we have yet to see any support for such an approach from Federated Farmers. So we are a long way from any action and there are bound to be many devils in any details, but I do believe that such an approach could offer a constructive way out of the impasse. In theory, this could all be done through the ETS, but tying cause and effect, cost and benefit, together in a much tighter programme would be an advantage.

I will finish with my standard plea: Please remember there can be much more to forestry than radiata pine.

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