Penetaui Kleskovic, te taumata, Te Runanga Nui O Te Aupouri, told the annual meeting of the Expert Mechanisms on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on Tuesday that the government had crashed the carbon market costing Māori forestry millions of dollars.

Speaking to Carbon News from Geneva, Kleskovic said the drop in the price of carbon - which followed Cabinet’s decision, late last year, to ignore Climate Change Commission advice on ETS settings - had already eroded $100 million worth of Treaty settlements.

And he said that proposed changes to how forestry is treated under the ETS could cost Māori billions more in lost earnings.

“It's a blight on our ability to utilize our land in a rational way.”

Kleskovic told the Geneva hearing that the New Zealand government had failed to adequately consult Māori on the current reviews of the ETS.

“The current ETS proposals are putting a $16 billion economic opportunity for Māori at risk. Māori have been working on significant development opportunities.”

“Given the poor state of the lands left to us following early land confiscation, and the enduring impact of colonisation in attempts to regain determination over our lands, afforestation is often the best option for development and investment,” he said.

When asked by Carbon News whether he would support growing native forests if government committed to ensuring forest owners were no worse-off than if they had grown pines in the permanent category, he said: “Sure but it will never happen.”

“If they take pines out [of the ETS] we will just grow red wood, if they say we can’t grow red wood we’ll grow eucalyptus. We will never ever, ever, ever grow native forests. We’ve already grown 150,000 trees last year.

“We will never ever acquiesce to having to plant natives,” said Kleskovic - who told the UN hearing he spoke “on behalf of Māori of the Far North.

He said the $16 billion figure came from work carried out by Infometrics on behalf of Maori trade organisation  Te Taumata.

View not shared by many Māori

Iwi Chair Forum climate spokesperson Mike Smith says Kleskovic’s views are not shared by most Māori.

“It’s a point of view of some forestry groups that benefit from carbon farming and sequestration.”

“But that's not the view of the majority of Māori people per se. That's the view of the vested  interest groups … which, in terms of the Māori community are just a fraction of the Māori community.

“I’ve just come from meetings over the last couple of days where we’ve been discussing the ETS reforms and biodiversity credit reforms that are being talked about at the moment and one of the things I’ve been hearing loud and clear is that Māori don’t like the idea of markets.

“The monetisation and commodification of these things is not fit for purpose. It’s not reducing gross emissions at all, and offsetting is not a tool that’s delivering. It might deliver money to a small group and make a small group of foresters rich but it’s certainly not delivering to our community.”

Smith said the recent floods in Tairāwhiti have shown the catastrophic impacts of pine slash on erosion prone land.

“There's a lot of questions about land use going forward, and what are some of the alternatives? I think there are alternatives. There are other things that can be explored. Pine trees are not that popular at the moment.”

He said a case can be made that landowners who were encouraged to plant pines by the government should receive reparations if changes are made to the ETS which significantly impact on expected earnings.

“I mean Penetaui’s father - Shane Jones - was rocking around a few years ago promoting the planting of a billion trees.

“But in a free market capitalist economy, which most people seem to be okay with, you take the profits when they're there and you take the lumps when they're not."

“The ETS’s primary purpose is to reduce emissions: not to produce forestry millions for a select group of people,” Smith said.

“That’s not its purpose. And if it's not meeting its primary purpose. It needs to be reformed, which is what's happening.

“And I think it's inevitable that a lot of foresters are going to have to take a haircut.”

He said they’re not alone. All sectors of the economy are going to face readjustments as a result of economic changes caused by climate change.

“This is a climate emergency. There’s going to be some pain.”

“We either lean into that and minimise it as much as we can or we kick it down the road and leave our children with a legacy of inaction and some very bad consequences.”

Pine and the Zombie Apocalypse 

Tech entrepreneur Barry Soutar is a committee member of Te Pa Penu - a pa just south of Ruatōria - that collectively owns a 130 hectare land block.

He said the effects of the recent floods have gone past a state of emergency. “Past the point at which we could even logically think about pine. We’ve turned down opportunity to plant pine because we’ve seen the damage it causes.”

“The best option for us is to get back our native trees as fast as possible,” he said.

“That’s a recent understanding for us. We’ve just got off the back of the zombie apocalypse. The zombie apocalypse being the recent storm damage and the compounding effect of multiple 100 year storms in recent years.”

Soutar said that may result in a loss of income but the retention of their culture and land is the most important thing.

“We’re past the economic arguments. We have to put natives back on the land as fast as we can. We had hoped to do that about a month ago. We had 150 people ready to start planting and we got rained out.”

“Not in our worst nightmare did we imagine this. It’s a luxury to talk about pine forests now.”

UN invited to send delegation to Aotearoa

Penetaui Kleskovic ended his presentation with a request for a UN investigation of the New Zealand government’s actions, and breaches of Māori rights under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and that a Special Rapporteur visit Aotearoa.

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 Jeremy Rose is a freelance journalist and former editor of Carbon News.