Friday, March 29, 2024

Forest area set to double

Neal Wallace
A big area of plantation forest due to be harvested in the next decade will significantly reduce New Zealand’s carbon sequestering stocks and increase emissions unless replanted.
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The Net Zero in NZ report by London-based Vivid Economics said the logged forests would be replanted but also predicted the area of plantation forest would nearly double in the next 30 years, even at moderate carbon prices.

The report was written for GLOBE-NZ, a cross-party group of 35 members of Parliament and funded by business and philanthropic foundations to look at the impact of different scenarios on emissions from energy, industry and waste and land.

It said planting forests was the only known technology that could be implemented at scale to remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

The authors calculated a carbon price of $50 a tonne could increase planting by up to 50,000 hectares.

“This means that forestry can provide NZ with an emissions buffer as it decarbonises its energy sector and invests in new technologies and management techniques to cut emissions from agriculture.”

Since 1990 the area of land used for plantation forest has grown 36% while the area dedicated to agriculture has fallen 25%.

Depending on the assessment used, Vivid calculated between 800,000 and three million hectares of eroded land and a further 700,000 to 5.1m hectares of grazing land could be could be suited to forestry.

NZ had 1.7m hectares of plantation forestry but the report forecast growing plantings peaking at 55,000ha a year, which would increase the forestry estate by between 500,000ha and 2.1m hectares by 2050.

“While this rate is high by recent standards, it is comparable to the growth rate experienced in NZ in the 1990s and is realistic given a supportive policy regime.”

Forest plantings and carbon retaining forest products sequestered 24m tonnes of carbon a year but could increase to 36m tonnes of carbon a year from 2040 to 2059.

The Vivid report also assumed that in addition to the increased plantation planting, up to 1m hectares of marginal agricultural land would revert to scrub and natural forest which would sequester 6m tonnes of carbon a year.

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