editorial

New name, new purpose

FORESTRY MINISTER, STUART NASH, HAS

announced that Te Uru Rākau (Forestry New Zealand) will be renamed Te Uru Rākau – New Zealand Forest Service, and will shift its operational headquarters from Wellington to Rotorua.

“The name change is small but significant. It signals a more hands-on role for a public forestry service, with specialists and advisors working alongside the sector,” says Mr Nash.

“We will lift planning and advisory capabilities within Te Uru Rākau – New Zealand Forest Service so it can offer a professional advisory service and share its forestry management expertise.

“It will provide more on-the-ground support to iwi, private landowners, farm foresters, local councils, timber processors, training institutes, and other forestry organisations. The Forest Service will maximise opportunities for the forestry and wood processing sector.

“Forestry will be a key part of our climate change response. In areas like biofuels, forestry can support our move away from fossil fuels. Innovative building products made from local wood will replace products such as concrete and steel.

“For Māori, there is huge potential across the whole forestry system, as landowners, community leaders, investors and guardians of the environment. We will continue to support Māori aspirations for land management, economic development, and job creation.

“By retaining more wood processing onshore, we create local jobs and further support rural communities. Wood processing plants offer the opportunity to create high-tech, high-value products and by-products to diversify the income streams of foresters.

“Farmers, foresters, and conservationists share an objective to plant more trees in the right places, whether to diversify farm incomes, stabilise erosion-prone hills, increase wood supply for processing, or create more permanent indigenous forests for biodiversity or recreational use.

“In the past three years forestry policies prioritised regional economic development, by supporting extensive tree planting and job creation. We are now building on those achievements to transition to a professional advisory and management service.

“Te Uru Rākau – New Zealand Forest Service will continue to work alongside local communities on the remaining tree planting projects that endure from the One Billion Trees funding.

“More than 258 million trees have been planted towards the goal of one billion trees by 2028. The dedicated fund to kickstart the public-private sector programme was time-limited, and last year it stopped accepting new applications for funding.

“It has served its purpose as a cornerstone of the programme by building momentum for new planting. Approximately $23 million of the fund is unallocated and will be reprioritised towards the new work of Te Uru Rākau – the New Zealand Forest Service, making it cost-neutral.

The Forest Owners Association (FOA) says the announcement “addresses a lack of good advice and support for potential foresters” and that it heralds the potential to fix vital bottlenecks in the initial stages of the forest industry supply chain and drive further timber processing downstream as well.

FOA President, Phil Taylor, says an expanded Te Uru Rākau and a specific revival of the extension activities of the Forest Service, which had operated between 1949 and 1987, is a recognition of both the critical role forestry plays in the New Zealand economy and its leading role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is so much expected of the forestry industry by the government over the next ten to thirty years. Yet the expert advice and assistance, which can best come from government, has been seriously lacking,” says Mr Taylor.

“Especially for farm foresters, advice on whether to plant, what to plant and how to manage, has been inadequate. For a farmer, planting out a part of their farm is the second most important commercial decision of their lives, after buying the farm itself. But so many of them appear to not have enough good information to go about it properly.

“While there are excellent forest advisory and management companies operating, and I would hate to think their commercial operations would ever be compromised, there still needs to be an overarching coordination from government.

“We have the Climate Change Commission wanting another 380,000 hectares planted in production forestry within the next 15 years, the government itself relying on us to earn an extra $2.6 billion in exports within 10 years, and an industry transformation which will be led by more processing in New Zealand.

“I’m pleased for instance, that Stuart Nash said New Zealand will be relying on innovative timber construction, explicitly to replace steel and concrete, so we can store carbon in buildings rather than emit it.

“All this is a huge challenge, and yet it requires good decisions now at planting time in the context of a wait for many years for a timber harvest.”

Mr Taylor also says he supports Stuart Nash’s colleague, Agriculture Minister, Damien O’Connor’s recently reported intention to examine what drives farmers to convert to forestry.

“It seems the government is having second thoughts about a knee-jerk restriction on the rate of conversion to forestry on better land and is more understanding of how vital it is to support farmers’ choices to enter this vital industry,” he adds. NZL

Forestry Minister, Stuart Nash. Forest Owners Association President, Phil Taylor.