A million hectares of best intentions

Every good morning starts with a coffee.

Aromatic steam swirls from my favourite mug, she holds a full-bodied dark roast with subtle notes of caramel, grounded by earthy tones of cedar. It pairs exceptionally well with devastating headlines and gruelling imagery, engineered to hold attention for a fleeting moment before joining the ever-growing list of normalised catastrophes.

Europe is on fire.

More than 627,000 hectares of the European Union have burnt since the beginning of the year. Across the continent, heat, drought and fire have transformed another northern summer into something increasingly difficult to describe as exceptional. This June was the hottest ever recorded in Western Europe.

If you, too, indulge in a late-night scroll through social media, the economic, human-health and environmental consequences are stripped down to something strangely mundane - disgruntled, sweaty tourists.

I’m sitting by the fire. Outside, the weather is an undecided mix of snow and rain. This winter, we’ve opted for ‘old man’s pine’, more formally known as Pinus radiata. The same species that dominates New Zealand’s plantation forestry estate. It burns enthusiastically. Perhaps too enthusiastically.

I’m not immune to the juxtaposition here. The same heat that warms my body, twenty thousand kilometres away, has scarred communities and charred landscapes.

“Pine cone grenades and pine baking carbon” captures my attention. Released last Sunday by The Guardian, the article details the ruinous fires in France, which have burnt more land than ever recorded, with the number of home evacuations surpassing any point since the Second World War.

I throw another log on the fire for good measure. My coffee still holds a faint heat by the time it’s reduced to glowing charcoal.

In France, as in New Zealand, the colonial dislike for the simplicity of a landscape’s natural being serves as a catalyst for eventual environmental disaster.

The Landes Forest, which feeds France’s inferno, is Europe’s largest man-made forest, consisting almost entirely of maritime pine (Pinus pinaster). In the nineteenth century, much of the Landes in south-western France was marshland, regarded at the time as more of an inconvenience than a site of ecological importance. In 1857, legislation under Napoleon III forced communes to drain and ‘sanitise’ the landscape and establish plantations of maritime pine.

In 2008, New Zealand’s Labour government took a stance on climate change by establishing the Emissions Trading Scheme. There's a strong argument that it was created with the best of intentions. Yet, somewhere along the way, good intentions surrendered to good business, and we created an industry around offering emitters a ‘green card’ out of responsibility.

Today, almost 900,000ha of post-1989 forest is registered in New Zealand’s ETS, including both indigenous (19%) and exotic forest (81%). Separately, MPI’s most recent survey of New Zealand’s post-1989 plantation estate found it to be entirely exotic, with 97.2% comprising exotic conifers and radiata pine alone accounting for 90.2%.

And while the decree of nineteenth-century Napoleon III existed without the environmental intentions behind Helen Clark’s establishment of the ETS some 150 years later, there is an uncomfortable symmetry in the outcome: carbon on the ledger, kindling on the landscape.

Depending on who funds the article, New Zealand’s vast estate of radiata pine represents a million hectares of combustible fuel under a warming climate - or a million-hectare answer to that very climate problem.

The continued expansion of carbon farms in New Zealand is nothing short of smoke and mirrors. We’ve engineered a system where continued emissions can be offset against monoculture forests, and where the appetite for a generous annual return outweighs consideration of biodiversity, landscape resilience and wildfire risk.

The ETS was supposed to make emitting increasingly expensive, creating an economic incentive to invest in lower-emission alternatives. Instead, forestry has provided something considerably cheaper: the ability to offset those emissions. Carbon farming has become the masquerade of carbon reduction.

This week, rather boldly, RNZ described the mass conversion of New Zealand’s landscape into carbon farms as ‘kicking the can down the road’. It makes me wonder how blindingly obvious the problem is when the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment publicly warned that mass pine afforestation is destabilizing the ETS.

A knot of resin explodes in the fire, and she roars ablaze.

If New Zealand were serious about its approach to climate change, we’d have policies that penalise carbon emissions rather than make offsetting increasingly profitable. We’d invest in sequestration that demands more than carbon alone.

New Zealand’s native bush, unlike the conifer landscapes of the Northern Hemisphere, evolved largely in the absence of fire. While our native trees may sequester carbon more slowly than Pinus radiata, they do so in a way that enhances our natural environment, complements productive landscapes and avoids the conscious conversion of our country into a giant tinderbox.

We’re left with one uncomfortable question: do carbon farms exist to protect against climate change or profit from it? My coffee has gone cold.