19 October 2012
A carbon farming company's plans to establish thousands of hectares of plantation forest on Kaiwarua Station in Canterbury's Hunter Hills may not proceed. In April, Environment Canterbury granted a consent allowing New Zealand Land Leasing Ltd to plant 4230 hectares of radiata pine and Douglas-fir on the station. It had originally applied to plant forest on 5585 ha of the 5915-hectare property.But Evan MacClure, a director of Forest Management Ltd the company contracted to manage the plantation, said this week it was unclear whether the project would go ahead. He said planting Kaiwarua had not yet started and it was possible the property would not be planted but sold instead.
He declined to elaborate on reasons for the delay. The declining carbon market had caused difficulty for many involved in New Zealand's carbon industry, Mr MacClure said.
"[Forest Management] has properties that we're planting based on contracts with last year's prices and we will still be doing some reasonable planting compared with what the national total planted area will be," he said.
"The carbon trading business stimulated a lot of this . . . and [the changes] are probably going to take a lot of the investment that went into carbon back out."
Source: Story by Megan Miller, Timaru Herald. To read the full story, click here.