Why Oppose the Climate Change Response (Forestry Conversion) Bill
This is not about protecting farmland. It’s about restricting carbon sinks, interfering in the ETS market, and favouring high-emission agriculture while creating artificial barriers to climate-positive land use.
Here’s what the bill really does, why it matters, and how it fits into a larger trend of executive land control and emissions avoidance.
What This Bill Really Does
- Caps exotic forest planting on LUC class 1–6 land to 25% per farm: Regardless of landowner intent or carbon benefit, forest conversions are limited — even on marginal or erosion-prone parts of the farm.
- Requires a restrictive permit system for further forestry: Access to the ETS is controlled through an annual ballot, capped at 15,000 hectares, with no appeal rights and non-transferable permits.
- Imposes complex mapping, compliance, and record-keeping burdens: Property-scale land assessments must follow official standards and be retained for 20 years — an expensive barrier for smallholders.
- Fails to distinguish between forestry types: Treats short-rotation pine and permanent carbon forests the same, despite vastly different climate and ecological impacts.
- Overrides ETS market logic with top-down land controls: Shifts land-use decisions from carbon pricing signals to bureaucratic permissions, undermining the purpose of the ETS.
- Applies Treaty-exemptions narrowly and conditionally: Many Māori landowners, especially those with general land or collective aspirations, remain constrained.
Why This Threatens Everyone
- Protects pollution while limiting climate mitigation: Agricultural emissions remain unrestricted, while forests — our best natural offset — are rationed.
- Centralises land control in the executive: The government decides who can plant, where, how much, and when — a radical intrusion into landowner autonomy and ETS participation.
- Disadvantages small landowners and innovative carbon farmers: Larger entities can navigate the compliance and ballot system. Smaller climate-conscious actors are left behind.
- Suppresses Māori development and Treaty-based enterprise: The bill adds red tape where there should be redress — especially for whānau, hapū, and post-settlement entities seeking ETS access.
- Normalises emissions-based privilege: Polluting land uses remain unchallenged, while climate-positive transitions are locked behind red tape.
The Bigger Pattern
This is not a standalone bill. It mirrors a wider deregulatory agenda disguised as reform. Like other government moves — from weakening the RMA to repealing wellbeing reporting — it reflects an executive preference for control, privatisation, and short-term industry loyalty over long-term sustainability.
Climate action is being selectively dismantled. Carbon forestry, especially by Māori and rural communities, is now being treated as a threat — while dairy emissions and land degradation remain untouched.
This bill is not about balance. It is about protectionism dressed in green language.
If You See What’s Happening
Let it be clear: this bill does not protect land or climate. It protects emissions-heavy industry, suppresses transition tools, and creates new exclusion zones inside our carbon system.
If you believe in genuine climate action… if you believe that landowners should have the right to participate in carbon sequestration… if you believe that Māori and rural communities should be empowered, not filtered — now is the time to oppose this bill.
“You don’t fight climate change by handcuffing carbon sinks.” — Ukes Baha