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SECTION E - SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE USE

New Zealand indigenous forests

  1. New Zealand has around 6.4 million hectares of indigenous forest. About 77 percent is Crown owned and managed by the Department of Conservation. About two percent is Crown owned, located on the West Coast and allocated for timber production under the 1986 West Coast Accord. The balance of about 20 percent is in private ownership including 12 percent in Mâori ownership.
  2. Part IIIA of the Forests Act 1949 promotes the sustainable management of indigenous forestland. This includes the maintenance of natural (ecological) and amenity values in perpetuity. Landowners must have a sustainable management plan or permit if they wish to harvest and mill or export indigenous timber. The Act also affects exporters of indigenous forest produce. It covers all indigenous forests except the Crown's West Coast indigenous production forests, timber from forests on land reserved under the South Island Landless Natives Act 1906 (SILNA), timber from forested land administered by the Department of Conservation, and planted indigenous forest.
  3. The exemption of some of these forest categories has come under considerable scrutiny and review due to environmental concerns related to unsustainable logging and the adverse commercial effect of such logging on private indigenous forests owners required to manage under the Forest Act regime.

Sustainable land management

  1. Two hundred years of forest clearance and agricultural development has had a profound impact on all parts of New Zealand's society, economy and environment. As a consequence agriculture, horticulture and forestry are collectively the biggest users of New Zealand's land resource covering two-thirds of its land area. The next biggest use is the protected estate (30 percent).
  2. The total area of land used for agricultural production has, however, been shrinking since the mid 1980s as a consequence of the removal of farm subsidies, the retirement and/or reversion of some marginal land and expansion of commercial forestry. There has also been a trend towards the more intensive and diversified use of the remaining agricultural land, due to the expansion of dairying and horticulture and the need to lift profitability of traditional pastoral farming in the face of declining real agricultural commodity prices. This, combined with a legacy of the past large scale indigenous forest clearance, development of unstable hill country and the introduction of a range of new pests and weeds, has resulted in major sustainable land management challenges facing the country.
  3. Major challenges include:
  • high country degradation (in the South Island high country);
  • hill country erosion (mainly in the North Island);
  • localised soil degradation and the impact of agricultural runoff on ground and surface water (under intensive agricultural production);
  • water allocation conflicts; and
  • ongoing loss of indigenous biodiversity from both the protected and productive land.
  1. There is a growing awareness by the wider community and the sectors of the need to improve past practices, and in some cases make land use changes, to move the sectors onto a more environmentally and economically sustainable footing. There is also growing international market pressure and focus on the environmental credentials of agricultural and forestry production in New Zealand and world wide. This poses both risks and opportunities for the sectors.
  2. Considerable progress has been made over the last two decades in starting to address some of these problems. This has been brought about by improved technology, development of new land management skills and an increased understanding of these issues. The RMA has provided an improved and integrated regulatory framework in which to deal with these issues.
  3. The nature and the scale of some of these problems and our success in tackling them is becoming clearer as a consequence of the ongoing development of a broad range of environmental indicators at the national, regional and local level. These indicators will help identify environmental risks to determine the appropriate focus of future priority for action by land-managers, and local and central Government.
  4. The Sustainable Land Management Strategy places its emphasis on working in an enabling and supportive partnership with the sectors. The Strategy recognises that the primary responsibility for moving to a more sustainable basis rests with land managers. This involves co-ordinating resources to promote best management practices and the collating and sharing of information that can be delivered in a form that will meet the needs, and influence the behaviours, of land managers. This is based on the recognition that the market alone will not be able to deliver environmentally sustainable outcomes.
  5. The challenge is to implement the right mix of interventions where appropriate (education, information, regulation, economic instruments and incentives) to maintain the momentum towards a more environmentally and economically sustainable basis for the sectors.

Resource Management Act and the Resource Management Amendment Bill

  1. The RMA has generated some concerns relating to the nature of controls, compliance costs and the variation in quality of implementation by local government. The different sectors have raised a number of issues about how the sectors are treated by regional and district plans developed under the RMA.
  2. An amendment bill was drafted and referred to the Transport and Environment Select Committee.

Biodiversity

  1. New Zealand is a party to the 1993 International Convention on Biological Diversity (the Convention) and is required to prepare a national strategy to protect our biodiversity and to report regularly on progress of the strategy and on the implementation of the Convention.
  2. The New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy was released for public comment and 7,800 submissions were received. A series of over 40 public meetings were held which sought further feedback on the draft strategy. A significant amount of the indigenous biodiversity on private land is in areas associated with land-based production. The implementation of the strategy has the potential to affect the land based sectors. The land-based sectors had representatives at these meetings and made extensive submissions on the draft strategy.
  3. Biodiversity is also being addressed under the RMA through the development of a national policy statement on biodiversity. The national policy statement aims to ensure that the issue of biodiversity is dealt with in a consistent manner by local government. One of the greatest criticisms of the RMA has been how local government have dealt with areas of significant indigenous flora and fauna on private land.

Water

  1. There are a number of issues concerning water quality, which could impact on human health, community infrastructures and water resource uses. These can and are being attributed to various land uses for primary production (that is, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, etc).
  2. A number of these issues relate to nitrates, heavy metals, and pesticide and chemical residues entering the water table. These are of concern as they pose threats to the environment, human health, water supplies and food. There is a need for continued vigilance, appropriate monitoring and comparative data for the use of particular pesticides and heavy metal levels in fertilisers and biosolids, and their relationship to internationally accepted threshold levels and existing background levels within the soil profile.
  3. There are well known cases and areas (e.g., Pukekohe) where problems have been identified which require a changed approach, or which may result in calls for significant changes to existing land uses or land management practices. These changes may come at a cost to these users and/or lead to significant constraints on the use of their land.
  4. The effective and appropriate treatment for farm dairy effluent is an important issue in relation to the protection of water quality and rivers, streams and groundwater, as dairy cows in particular have been identified as a contributor to direct threats to water bodies.
  5. The major shift over recent years to land based effluent distribution systems for farming has substantially mitigated some earlier water quality concerns. However, this has and will require careful planning, management and treatment measures to avoid unacceptable bacterial loading levels and microbiological contamination of water bodies that are required for other uses.
  6. For agriculture, including all primary production and processing activities, issues of available water resources, their allocation, and the consent systems for their distribution and use have always been very important, and those trends, threats and areas of potential conflict are intensifying. Competition for the use of scarce water resources, and the need for reliable and improved information concerning these resources, is intensifying in the face of recent drought events and growing demands for higher levels of water flow retention to protect ecosystems and instream values.
  7. For the eastern regions of both the North and South Islands, irrigation requirements of agriculture form the largest abstractive use of the available (and often scarce) water resources. These requirements are sometimes for supplying water to very large irrigation schemes (e.g. Canterbury and the Rangitata Division Race) or are the cumulative impact of many individual farm abstractions from the water resources (groundwater, and streams/rivers).
  8. These issues and aspects are all part of, and background to, various investigations, trials, demonstrations and research programmes. The work covers not only issues of the available water resources and drought pattern expectations, but also on water use and irrigation efficiencies, better irrigation systems and equipment.

Climate change

  1. Climate change issues are strategically significant to the agriculture and forestry sectors for two main reasons. In the medium to long term, adapting to changes in New Zealand's climate patterns will have implications for investment and production systems in agriculture, horticulture and forestry. While these implications are likely to be substantial they are not canvassed further at this point. In the short to medium term, the way in which New Zealand responds to commitments, particularly the pending legally binding commitment in the Kyoto Protocol, established through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is significant. The response, which involves both international negotiations and domestic policy development, presents both risks and opportunities to the sectors.
  2. Two critical risks have been identified. These risks involve allocation of responsibilities for achieving emissions reduction targets across the economy (any loss of relative share of assigned amount to high emission/high abatement cost sectors represents a cost to the agriculture sector) and a distinct lack of involvement of people from, or representing, the sectors in the policy process.
  3. In addition to these critical risks, other risks include: climate change, policy development having to date been based on limited economic modelling and scientific research (with consequent implications for certainty in policy decisions); potential increases in input costs (particularly energy or energy dependent products); data credibility (the reliability of agricultural and forestry statistics and data bases will become increasingly important); and international competitiveness being affected through some competitors not being exposed to emissions reduction costs. Decisions based on partial data or limited analysis run the risk of being wrong.
  4. Opportunities balance these risk factors. The key opportunity is the establishment of an international emissions trading regime. It is likely that New Zealand will participate in an international market as a net seller. Some 130 MT CO2 equivalent will be stored in qualifying Kyoto Forests during the first commitment period (2008 - 2012) at prices predicted in the range of $10-$30 tonne CO2 equivalent. This opportunity represents billions of dollars. Methane savings of 16 MT CO2 equivalent due to reductions in ruminant livestock numbers since 1990 will also be tradable. Any further verifiable savings due to the development and application of methane reduction tools and strategies would provide further trading opportunities.
  5. Additional opportunities include an impetus for improved energy efficiency (with associated implications for improved resource use efficiency, profitability and environmental performance) and the potential that further sinks activities (e.g. increasing soil carbon and reverting scrubland) become eligible.
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