More native forest to manage emissions obligationsFriday 28 Apr 2017
The report, commissioned by Air New Zealand, explores some of the barriers and potential to get more native forestry offsets created in New Zealand. “Eight percent of the forest land registered in the ETS is native,” said Dr Suzi Kerr, Senior Fellow at Motu and co-author of the report. “Since 2008, however, only 500 Ha of new native forest has been established and registered. If we established another 10,000 Ha of land in native forest, this would sequester 65,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, which would be eligible to earn 65,000 NZUs per year under the ETS.” Firms with obligations in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), or with high emissions that they cannot rapidly reduce, all need to plan ahead in case the unit price goes substantially higher than its current $17 per NZU. “Recently the International Energy Agency predicted that the international carbon unit price could go as high as US$190. If that happens, the more native forest we have established, the more we will celebrate” said Dr Kerr. “We don’t want all of NZ back in native forest but on large areas of marginal pasture land there really is no way New Zealand can lose,” said Dr Kerr. A recent academic paper by Dr Kerr and Tom Carver outlines this issue in more depth: Facilitating Carbon Offsets from Native Forests is now available on the Motu website. A note about the alternative options for offsetting emissions written by Veronika Meduna is also available. Both of these publications were commissioned and funded by Air New Zealand with the help of the Aotearoa Foundation and the Tindall Foundation. Source: Scoop  | ||
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