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Re-foresting New Zealand

Whakaora Nga Tamariki o Tane

Adaptive Resource Management Ltd

"...is a pragmatic approach to creating community effectiveness in restoring the natural character of our most threatened terrestrial ecosystems..."

"New Zealand leads the world in many aspects of conservation, but is very immature and conflicted in sustaining indigenous forest as part of our working landscape. Lessons learnt from successes and from disasters elsewhere can be combined with locally developed knowledge to accelerate the development of the mature culture that the sustainability challenge demands of us. As we abandon harvest of old growth forest we loose access to native timber as a defining part of our society unless we can create sustainable alternatives. Equally, failing to value productive indigenous forests as part of our economy, we define an exotic or treeless future for much of our landscape.

Re-foresting New Zealand draws together the technologies of silviculture and ecosystem restoration. It combines the traditional practices that have sustained the forests of Europe and Japan with the indigenous practices of the iwi of Aotearoa. It then blends in twenty first century insights into the management of genetic resources and the importance of effective carbon sequestration."

There are 5 intertwined strands to the programme:

STRAND ONE: Bridging conceptual and administrative barriers. Generating capacity for information exchange. Implement and track eco-sourced indigenous afforestation in NZ for certification purposes. Facilitate eco-seed sourcing from covenanted areas for restoration and afforestation in threatened and at-risk environments.

STRAND TWO: New Zealand-wide elite eco seed-sourcing register. Developing (SFF 06/047), identifying and documenting elite stands of native trees that provide our seed sources for the future. Advocating value of remaining elite stands as seed-sources for efficient, bio-diverse ecosystem restoration and high quality indigenous timber trees.

STRAND THREE: Sustainable development of biodiversity restoration in threatened ecosystems. Integrating eco-sourced indigenous timber-tree afforestation in farmed environments.

STRAND FOUR: Carbon-neutral farming and C-offsetting urban emissions, applying bare-land indigenous afforestation designs to fast-track ecological succession and C-sequestration.

STRAND FIVE: Sustainable rural development from permanent-canopy ecological silviculture.

"Re-foresting New Zealand is an exciting approach to creating linked incentives for re-afforestation in the land environments that have been most depleted of their native plant cover. I commend the project to you and would welcome any opportunity to explain aspects that require further clarification."

Peter Lawless.

Vigorous Puriri saplings (Vitex lucens), competing for a canopy gap, regenerating and synergising a forest ecosystem. Inspected by John Crawford of the Far North.