Ngā Pou a Tāne, the National Māori Forestry Association, is joining forces with non-Māori forestry interests to oppose a Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) decision to substantially hike the price to participate in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
The new fees are estimated to add at least $18 million per year in fees to have forests in the ETS, with some individual forest owners facing new fees of over $1 million a year, the group claims.
Ngā Pou a Tāne chair Te Kapunga Dewes says the fees are in breach of the Crown’s duties as a Treaty partner and put the environmental and economic futures of Māori and non-Māori alike at grave risk.
“Many iwi and Māori landowners are captured participants of the ETS. As a result of confiscations and the Treaty settlement process, much of the land Māori have been left with is best – and often only – suited to afforestation. Indeed, in many of these settlements, the carbon value of forests was part of the negotiation and settlement with the Crown,” Dewes said.
“The value of those settlements will again be eroded through this new fee regime, with many of the new costs disproportionately hitting Māori directly.”
Dewes says the new fees put at risk the opportunity to use Māori land as a key part of Aotearoa’s climate action.
“We have an enormous environmental and economic opportunity to use our beautiful but remote whenua as a key part of Aotearoa’s climate action. We can have a nature-positive impact by having more forests, which means better water quality, less soil erosion, and better biodiversity than farmland – all of which these new charges put at risk.”
Loggerheads... again.
The government and forestry interests are already at loggerheads over a plan to remove pine trees from the ETS.
The government argues that the change is necessary to meet New Zealand’s climate change targets, but Chris Karamea Insley, chair of Te Taumata, the Māori forestry lobby says such a move would wipe as much as $16 billion of value from Māori forestry assets, especially given much of the land returned by the treaty settlement process is not suitable for anything other than Pine.
The recent announcements are at least the third time where forestry interests handed back to Māori through the treaty settlement process have later had their value depricated by government policy.
The transition from the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012) to the Paris Agreement(COP) marked a shift in carbon accounting methodologies which also hit values.
Under Kyoto, the government allowed activities like deforestation to be excluded from emissions calculations. However, with the adoption of COP, they were no longer exempted.
Certain units earned during the Kyoto period were also canceled. The units, known as Assigned Amount Units (AAUs), had no remaining value in Aotearoa, nor could they be traded internationally.
About 50 per cent of New Zealand’s forestry interests are owned by Māori, much of which rose from Treaty settlements that Iwi argue were negotiated with the understanding the land would participate within the ETS at a certain value.
Ngā Pou a Tāne has partnered with the Climate Forestry Association, NZ Institute of Forestry, and the Forest Owners Association in launching judicial review proceedings against the Ministry for Primary Industries’ (MPI) and its new fees regime.
The group collectively represents owners of more than 300,000 hectares of forest.
They are seeking a halt to the new fees.