BusinessDesk Opinion Piece by Te Kapunga Dewes

Today’s Opinion piece published in BusinessDesk is by Ngā Pou a Tāne Chair, Te Kapunga Dewes.  We encourage Māori landowners and foresters to read this article as we think you will find it an interesting and important point of view.

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Don’t cut off Māori landowners’ forest options

Climate change is a vital issue for Māori, not only because our communities will be amongst the first to feel its effects, but also because we will be the most vulnerable to its impacts.

How Aotearoa responds to climate change could also be a catalyst for enormous positive change for Māori, socially, environmentally, and economically.

But this will only be possible if we can work in partnership with the government to ensure a just transition to a low emissions economy, reducing the impact on our vulnerable communities.

For a large proportion of whenua Māori, afforestation is our best option.

The legacy of colonisation has had a significant role in this.  In many cases, forestry is the only sustainable development option for Māori land not only because it is remote and rugged, but our unique ownership structures make mortgaging near-impossible and attracting investment very difficult.

Over half of whenua Māori is now in forestry because 80% of the land that remains in Māori ownership is of poor quality for the purpose of economic wealth creation, while large areas returned through settlement processes are in exotic forestry.

Until recently, how this land is used was largely unregarded.

Hidden in the hard-to-reach parts of rural Aotearoa, much of whenua Māori is on hillsides and in gullies, far from rolling grasslands and the ports and roads that would make it attractive for farming, production forestry or commercial speculation.

New barriers

Suddenly, though, planting trees has become part of the national conversation and, in some quarters, even a threat.  And in that increasingly heated kōrero, both the farming and environmental lobbies are trying to assert their views over the future of whenua Māori.

Some of these views are consistent with our own.

Re-cloaking the whenua in native species is a worthy aspiration – and one that is achievable over the long term.  We are not in conflict about the preference, nor the environmental benefits of native afforestation.

However, the groups that promote a native-only approach tend not to discuss how this option can be put into operation.  If they were able to show a pathway that is at least break-even on marginal and remote Māori-owned land, we would welcome that.

But in reality, they can’t, because the economics of native-only planting simply do not stack up – even with a heavy hand on the scales of the ETS.

Costing, by a conservative estimate, at least 10 times as much to establish and requiring at least three-and-a-half times the area of land as exotics to sequester the same amount of CO2, natives simply will not grow fast enough to make a meaningful difference to our climate change efforts in the next 30 years.

Native-only will cost Māori

A ’native-only’ solution would leave Māori landowners indebted and reliant on an uncertain and unnecesary regime of subsidies and government support.

For those advocating that exotic trees have no place in rural Aotearoa, their arguments suffer from the total lack of any factual basis.

So, they use any rhetoric that supports their argument; pines are toxic to water, needles cause acidity in forests, and pine forests have no biodiversity.  The list goes on.

These statements are simply not true, no matter how often and how loudly that are told.

We are sure that many – particularly those from the academic or environmental sector – have entered this debate with good intentions.

Limiting Māori opportunity

But what their approach boils down to is simply a desire to assert their control.  Once again, Māori are being told how others believe it is best to use our land, and the government – through its latest Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) proposals – are lining up with them.

Rather than trying to constrain how whenua Māori is used, Ngā Pou a Tāne believes what Māori need more options, not fewer.

Any groups looking to remove opportunities, like the planting of exotic trees as permanent forests or as a nurse crop for transition to natives, from our Māori landowners cannot be said to be working in our best interest, or even that of the environment.

They are either unlikely to be Māori and so they don’t have our unique understanding of Mātauranga Māori, they have no skin in the game in terms of responsibility for landholdings, or they are uninformed – they’ve been lied to.

We say this not to be dismissive, but because it is inconceivable that anyone with the best interests of Māori at heart would choose to take away the potential of the best-performing options in the carbon economy.

There are quite literally billions of dollars at stake: billions of dollars that could make a fundamental difference to outcomes Māori for generations while putting Māori knowledge, Māori land and sustainable Māori investment at the centre of our climate change efforts.

https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/opinion/dont-cut-off-maori-landowners-forest-options