New Zealand and the rest of the world can't solve the climate crisis or the biodiversity crisis separately, but must work on them in tandem, writes Rod Oram
The Climate Change Commission is recommending to the government significant changes in how we use trees. Its proposals will deliver gains to our economy. But they fall short of the much greater benefits delivered by genuine Nature based Solutions. These are deeply integrated approaches to tackling humankind’s co-crises of climate and ecosystems.
New Zealand has arguably more scope to use such solutions, and to derive greater benefit from them, than many countries. In my column last week I summarised the case for them and focused on their application in agriculture, which was a critical climate response the Commission has ignored. This column focuses on forestry here and the burgeoning work abroad on Nature based Solutions.
“Plant and pollute” was the succinct summary of our existing approach to trees as carbon sinks Rod Carr, chair of the Commission, gave to a carbon forestry conference in Rotorua on Wednesday. In other words, we’ve planted lots of trees but we’ve kept increasing our emissions.
More formally, the Commission says in its final recommendations to government: “Relying heavily on forestry might help Aotearoa meet its 2050 emissions reduction targets but it would make maintaining net zero long-lived emissions beyond that date more difficult. It would delay people taking actions that reduce gross emissions, lead to higher cumulative emissions and push the burden of addressing gross emissions on to future generations.” Along the way, excessive tree planting would also reduce our land use options.
Various problems create our dysfunctional approach to carbon sequestration to date. Crucially, radiata pine, which account for the bulk of our plantings, grow and absorb carbon quickly in their early decades. But we harvest most of them in typically their third decade; replanting pines only restores the carbon lost from harvesting rather than increasing our sequestration; and even if the pines are in permanent forests, they store minimal carbon in their later decades and have far shorter lives than native species.
Thus, the Commission recommends we plant more exotics like radiata pine to capture more carbon in coming decades but sharply ramp up our plantings of natives to ensure our longer-term sequestration. To achieve both goals, it advocates a range of changes in existing mechanisms such as the Emissions Trading Scheme and the creation of new policies and programmes.
The logic of this change in forestry strategy is shown in these three graphics from the Commission’s final recommendations. The first shows the four scenarios the Commission used to help it analyse our responses to the climate crisis. “Tailwinds” is the most effective one. We make the greatest progress because we harness two powerful forces for change – more sustainable behaviour, and cleaner technology. “Headwinds” is the least effective because we’ve failed to do much of either. As a result, we become even more reliant on forests to sequester carbon.
The second chart shows our current emissions by source, our track under current policy settings, and the outlook under Headwinds and Tailwinds scenarios using the Commission’s policy recommendations. Tailwinds achieves the greatest reduction in emissions and requires slightly less sequestration to comfortably deliver better than just net zero emissions by 2050. Natives play their greatest role in Tailwinds, and the least role in the current policy settings.
The third chart models the effect of the Commission’s recommendations to disincentivise deforestation and to increase the planting of natives. The Commission understands the challenges of planting natives. Seedlings are in short supply, more expensive, harder to cultivate and more prone to pests than their exotic counterparts. But to tackle these and other issues such as preventing reforestation from overwhelming local communities, the Commission offers a comprehensive chapter to guide the government in its revising and devising of policies and programmes.
These are helpful and welcome recommendations; and the forestry sector is up for the challenge, judging by the views and mood of presenters and delegates at the carbon forestry conference. (Disclosure: I was a presenter).
Strategies of some leading forestry companies are already based on these themes. New Zealand Carbon Farming, for example, plants radiata pines to store carbon but not to harvest them. Over the decades, it will manage its plantations so they gradually revert to native forests. So far, it has 90,000 ha of forests, half of which it owns and half it manages for other land owners. The trees have stored 22 million tonnes of carbon to date, with $95 m paid to landowning partners. This year it will begin its first plantation projects in Australia and the US.
The company is the largest provider of carbon credits in Australasia, with most buyers doing so to meet their regulatory obligations. But some are voluntary buyers who are taking responsibility for their carbon footprints. They are often keen on NZ credits because of six quality attributes that forests have here to varying degrees, Matt Walsh, NZCF's managing director and its co-founder with Bruce Miller, told the conference. These are a permanent forests category in the ETS; reversion from exotics to natives; native plantings; biodiversity benefits; social benefits; and community benefits.
Voluntary buyers will often pay a premium over the basic compliance price established by the ETS, Sean Weaver, chief executive and founder of Ekos, told the conference. Ekos grows and protects indigenous forests here and in the Pacific Islands. It sells carbon credits in them once the forests are certified either under the ETS or Plan Vivo, a Scottish-based organisation that created the world's first carbon credits in 1997.
The Commission's recommendation of a significant shift in our national forestry strategy would help us on a long journey. The ultimate goal is to enable our forests to reach their full potential as rich and sustainable sources of ecological and economic, social and cultural well-being. That goal was laid out earlier this year in O Tātou Ngāhere, a project by Pure Advantage, a sustainability NGO, and Tanē’s Tree Trust. I wrote about it in this column.
Ambitious ecosystem restoration strategies require finance. So far forests have relied on money from timber harvesting, and increasingly over the past dozen years from carbon storage. But there are many other natural attributes such as biodiversity which people and companies recognise and want to help finance. Potential ways to do so is explored in a recent research paper by David Hall and Sam Lindsay which is on the website of Biological Heritage, one of the 11 National Science Challenges.
But in its recommendations the Commission only makes a fleeting reference to forestry playing a much bigger and more diverse role in our bioeconomy. Yet, the vast range of contributions trees can make was described at the carbon forestry conference by Marc Gaugler from Scion, the forestry Crown Research Institute. One source he cited has a highly detailed graphic from the European confederation of pulp and paper makers, which is worth downloading.
That, though, only accounts for the industrial value of trees. Their nature and ecosystem values are far greater. The Commission, however, barely discuses these. It mentions the biodiversity benefits of native over exotic forests but fails to explore this vast and crucial subject. Diverse and healthy forests are just one example of Nature based Solutions to help us reverse the escalating climate crisis and the accelerating declines of ecosystems.
These dangers are well documented. For example, the World Economic Forum has long ranked climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse in the top five threats to humanity in its annual Global Risks Report.
In response the Forum launched a few years ago its Nature Action Agenda which includes three reports on the New Nature Economy.
Similarly, BCG, the global consulting firm, is one of many researchers to produce extensive studies on how vital ecosystem services are to humanity’s survival, yet how much damage business is doing to them. In one of its overview articles, it writes:
“Biodiversity creates significant economic value in the form of such ecosystem services as food provisioning, carbon storage, and water and air filtration, which are worth more than US$150 trillion annually—about twice the world’s GDP—according to academic research and BCG analysis.
“Five primary pressures—land-use and sea-use change, direct overexploitation of natural resources, climate change, pollution, and the spread of invasive species—are causing steep biodiversity loss. Already, the decline in ecosystem functionality costs the global economy more than US$5 trillion a year in the form of lost natural services.
“Many business activities, especially activities related to resource extraction and cultivation, contribute to the pressures driving biodiversity loss. The operations of four major value chains—food, energy, infrastructure, and fashion—currently drive more than 90 percent of man-made pressure on biodiversity.” Its full report is here with a graphic from it below:
How we apply economics to biodiversity and other aspects of nature received a big shakeup in February. It came in a report the UK Treasury commissioned from Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University.
“By overlooking the role nature plays in economic activity, economists underestimate the risks from environmental damage to growth and human welfare,” the Economist said of the report.
“Professor Dasgupta’s review is similar in spirit to a report on climate change by Nicholas Stern, commissioned by Britain’s Treasury in 2006, and now widely regarded as a seminal economic work on the subject,” it added.
Another critical turning point came earlier this month with the launch of a report on the co-crises of climate and biodiversity. A joint production of the UN’s climate and biodiversity panels, the report says the two crises are intertwined and we cannot solve one without solving the other. This New York Times article delves into the issues.
The report will have a big impact on the UN’s next global negotiations on biodiversity in Kunming, China, in October and its next global negotiations on climate in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. It’s vital delegates at both tackle the co-crises in tandem.
Our Climate Commission should have too. So now the buck stops with our government as it responds to the Commission's recommendations by producing its Emissions Reduction Plan by the end of this year, as required by our zero carbon legislation.
