'Forestry hysteria' not helpful - forest owners

The comments come in the aftermath of a Curia poll which found 54% of Kiwis supported a limit on the amount of fossil fuel emissions that can be offset with new pine forests.

“Picking selective facts from surveys they commissioned is building a narrative that suits their political purposes and deflects from the real issues,” says Graham West, president of the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association.

West says that asking whether people support a limit to forestry offsets or whether there is concern around the conversion of farms to forests to meet climate change, only address part of the issue.

“Both avoid the obvious question, ‘What alternatives do you prefer?’,” he says, adding that a more relevant question might be something along the lines of ‘What global temperature increase is acceptable before we start using land use change as a method of cooling the planet?’

West also points out that B + LNZ’s statistics on the number of hectares of farmland sold for forestry in 2021 are flawed.

“They ignore that 2,292 was to Manuka interests, and only 19,717 was for carbon forestry.”

He says that B + LNZ fails to give the numbers context.

“The total of whole farms sold to forestry interests that year was less than 0.5% of the area in pastoral farming,” West says.

“Farming’s leadership should be addressing the lack of progress in reducing global warming instead of deflecting public awareness on to the issue of a relatively small area being sold to forestry interests.

“Current flooding, droughts, and windstorms indicate climate change will destroy rural economies at significant scale unless tree crops are used to provide financial and environmental buffering. We need a better-informed debate than this,” West says.