NZ Carbon Farming already owns 73,000ha of forest and says it will plant 120 million trees.
It said they will meet 20% or 36m tonnes of NZ’s Paris commitments.
The privately owned family company has 30,000ha of its estate held as managed, permanent forest, it told a select committee hearing on proposed changes to the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Managing director Matt Walsh said the programme will not affect the availability of productive farmland.
“We only plant on the most marginal land, areas that are hard to access, erosion-prone and with no other productive purpose.”
Walsh drew Government attention last year when he used another select committee hearing to tell ministers advice they received about 30% of farmland having to be planted was wrong.
He showed officials the company’s maps and evidence of marginal land available for planting.
“For reasons we don’t understand, they disagree,” he said.
The firm says officials are looking for large areas of marginal land but often miss smaller pockets on individual farms.
Walsh said by planting less than 0.5% of marginal land the company can achieve 20% of NZ’s emissions target.
It wants improvements to the ETS Amendment Bill.
“We need the Government to ensure ETS settings are fair and encourage more participation by local investors including small communities, landowners and iwi.”
The industry is seeking greater flexibility for landowners.
“Over 70% of the industry is in support of a change in the settings to enable an existing ETS forest to be replaced by a forest planted on other land.”
Only pre-1990 forests can be felled and replanted as an equivalent sized forest somewhere else.
Ngai Tahu used that offsetting when felling pine forest for dairy farms in Canterbury, replanting on more marginal hill country elsewhere.
The industry is seeking to make that more equitable by extending it to ETS forests planted after 1990.
“This change will not cost the Government at all and economic analysis shows offset planting will generate from $7900 to $12,200 a hectare in benefits, up to $1.2 billion that can be returned from our programme alone,” Walsh said.
The proposal has the support of the Forest Owners Association.
President Peter Weir said it makes sense to have the pre-1990 rules apply post-1990.
“It will mean that land will ultimately go to the most appropriate use.”
Another carbon forestry company, Dryland Carbon, has bought a steep East Coast drystock property. Most of its marginal land will be planted in permanent forest, backed by carbon credits known as NZ Units.
The Government has also dealt with submissions highlighting the risk of units not backed by genuine forest plantings.
Canterbury University forestry expert Professor Euan Mason criticised plans to continue to use carbon credits in the ETS scheme that are not backed by trees or carbon sequestration technology.
Mason has described the system as seriously flawed and still highly suspect even with the removal of dodgy Ukrainian credits.
Walsh said all credits should represent robust and measurable reductions in emissions.
“Forestry carbon credits can deliver this.”
