The Aotearoa chainsaw massacre

Sunday, 2 June 2019

The kauri tree 'Awhiawhi' in Titirangi is under threat, but not just from kauri dieback (video first published in May 2019).

Valley Road is the kind of place that takes you through time.

It starts at the Dominion Road shops, punishingly grey and thick with vehicle smog before rising gently upwards, past the old, towering evergreen trees and the character villas, ending near the foot of Mt Eden itself, or what remains of it, at least, since it blew itself up 15,000 years ago

Auckland's Valley Road looks different than it used to a few years ago. Not in a strikingly obvious way, but in the details, those subtle changes you'd notice if you walked along it every day.

It's different in that some of the beautiful old trees are gone; that rhododendron with the colourful blossoms scattering scented petals on the footpath; that titanic bottlebrush in the corner of the garden, the one that played landlord to a handful of tūī that woke the neighbours with their maddeningly wonderful racket.

* Tree organisation gets Auckland residents caring for park's trees

* Facing the chop: 'Rare' native tree might be chopped down to build bus shelter

* Urban tree cover app designed to keep better record of city's biological heritage

* Auckland inequity reflected by density of urban tree coverage

* Little protection for Auckland's future notable trees**

Landscape architect Mandy McMullin knows Valley Road well, and wrote about the changes she had observed since the trees started coming down.

There used to be a handsome old house, with a front yard splattered with shades of yellow and green. It's now consumed by a supermarket car park.

A small stand of native trees - in front of the Greenpeace office, of all places - gone; a century old tōtara, once behind a backpackers and now nowhere to be found, surplus to requirements; the rhododendron and the bottlebrush, one a stump and the other history.

'As I see them come down people are replacing them with bigger and bigger house footprints, garages, pools,' McMullin says.

Two Norfolk Pines - one of which was the tallest tree in Auckland and among the tallest of its species in the world - were removed for safety concerns, even though the school was allowed to expand beneath the trees.

'A lot of the big sites around here are being bought by developers, and it's really changing the character of the city. We'll never see those big trees again.'

You can see it for yourself by following along in Google Street View; giant, drooping trees, lost somewhere between 2009 and 2018.

Even now, the trees are still being chopped down at a rapid clip, McMullin says. Pōhutukawa and tōtara, older than any living human being, gone in a matter of minutes.

It has changed Valley Road, albeit subtly - the character of the neighbourhood is at risk of disappearing.

22 trees were cut down along Palmerston North's main street because of complaints about bird poo.

'Those really big trees, the established trees around here, will never come back,' McMullin says.

Auckland's tallest tree used to be around 53m tall, so tall that its upper branches were anchored to the horizon, standing above everything.

It was a Norfolk Pine, likely the tallest of its kind in the country, and possibly the world. Its biggest branches weighed 250kg, as much as a small grizzly bear; its pine cones were the size of pineapples.

Waitakare Ranges Regional Parkland in Titirangi. Native bush, including regenerating kauri forest, will be cleared for a new wastewater plant.

It's unclear how old the tree was when it was cut down. It was likely older than a century, similar in age to the Diocesan School for Girls, of which it was part of the grounds.

It was cut down because it was a safety risk - despite the school's considerable efforts to keep the tree, it was simply too dangerous, and so it went.

On the other side of the city, far out west, some locals have been fighting for months to save an area of native forest, which contains native lizards, tui, kereru, and regenerating kauri forest.

Kauri are a threatened species these days, largely due to the dieback disease turning ancient giants into skeletons. But the city is growing, and a new wastewater plant needs to be built, so the kauri are on their way out. They're only a few minutes away from Awhiawhi, a centuries-old kauri that has miraculously survived attempts to cut it down - first by protesters scaling the tree, then by court order.

Then there were the old magnolia trees removed from a park because they blocked the view of a statue; the 150-year-old Norfolk Pine, one of the finest individual trees of its species in the world, now a stump; New Zealand's largest London Plane tree, 175 years old, cut down before its record was known; a stand of dozens of tōtara, the reason why a nearby road was called Totara View Road, cleared for more subdivision; the rows of trees lining the main drag of Palmerston North, cut down because bird poo was deterring shoppers.

A stand of mature trees in Remuera, cut down between 2009 (left) and 2018 (right).

New Zealand is losing some of its finest urban trees at such a pace that some tree advocates are calling it a crisis.

It is particularly evident in Auckland, where development pressures have transformed the front yards of historic neighbourhoods, ushering chainsaws to trees that took a century to grow and a couple of minutes to fall.

'It's out of control,' said Dr Mels Barton, of the Tree Council.

'It's just disgusting what's going on, and we're seriously going to regret it - but by the time we get our heads around it, it's going to be way beyond too late.'

Urban trees have always been vulnerable to removal; They can become a nuisance by growing too large, or by dropping branches, or by spreading their roots and their branches into drains and gutters.

A 150-year-old Norfolk Pine, among the largest in the world, was cut down in Snells Beach by a developer.

In recent years, however, they've been removed en masse, particularly in Auckland.

One major factor was a law change. In 2009, the then National-led government passed an amendment to the Resource Management Act removing the ability to give blanket protection to trees in urban areas.

It effectively forbade councils from passing any rule protecting a class of tree. Before then, many councils had those rules: Auckland, for example, gave automatic protection to any native trees taller than 6m or rounder than 60cm, and exotic trees taller than 8m or rounder than 80cm. It was comprehensive enough to cover most of the majestic, mature trees that people value: the pohutukawa, the kauri, and the tōtara; the leafy gum trees, the elms, and the pines.

Those rules were replaced with nothing. When the law change came into effect on January 1, 2012, hundreds of thousands of urban trees across immediately New Zealand lost protection.

It didn't happen immediately. The law was challenged in the Environment Court, allowing some councils to keep general protection rules, until the law was amended once more in 2013 to reinstating the government's intent.

Arborist Johno Smith climbed Awhiawhi, a 400 year old kauri, in 2015 to stop it being chopped down.

That law is now the status-quo: It doesn't matter whether a tree is a 5m tall exotic pine, or a 40m tall endangered kauri, neither has automatic protection under any law, except for two narrow exceptions.

Councils still have the power to protect individual trees by listing them on a public registry for trees with notable heritage or aesthetic value. In Auckland, this is called the schedule of notable trees, and it was never intended for general tree protection; it was a way to protect trees that were of such collective significance they needed an additional layer of protection.

To qualify for the register, a tree needs to meet certain criteria, based on an elaborate scoring system which takes into account the tree's age, health, and heritage value, among other things.

Auckland's schedule of notable trees lists around 7000 trees, most of which were added prior to 2012; Of those, around half are of an exotic species, around 10 per cent are weeds, and four percent are phoenix palms, which are deemed pests in the region's pest management strategy.

An invasive pest added to the schedule many years ago - perhaps because it's in a recognisable place, like a busy intersection - might qualify for the schedule, but a tall, mature, native pōhutukawa might not.

Locals protest a proposed water treatment plant in native bush near Titirangi.

The schedule also requires specific information, such as the tree's location, usually associated with a street address. This has already caused problems: In 2017, Auckland Council cut down three protected 80-year-old pecan trees due to an error in its mapping system which identified them as being on a neighbouring property.

Councils can also protect trees by establishing a Significant Ecological Area (SEA), a designation meant for places with notable biodiversity.

This is even more restrictive than the public register; an SEA can only apply to native vegetation, and are generally meant to protect wide areas, not individual or small groups of trees in a person's front yard.

It's that simple. If a tree is not protected under one of these two measures, it likely has no protection at all.

There will be more place like Valley Road around the city, where majestic trees are routinely chopped down, but it's impossible to pinpoint how many.

Seven years after urban trees lost blanket protection, there is little reliable data for how many have been cleared.

Because there is no legal requirement to give notice when cutting down a tree on private property, there is no public record when it happens.

Tall trees cleared around Hillsborough between 2009 (left) and 2018 (right).

It has been left to the public to monitor, and sometimes protest, the felling of urban trees.

One of those people is Paul Gosling, an arborist in Whāngarei.

Gosling is a contradiction: While he is a tree lover and a self-proclaimed 'ambassador for trees', his job often requires him to cut them down.

In his defence, Gosling says that unlike some other arborists in the phone book, he makes a fuss any time he is asked to cut down an undeserving tree, often by ringing the council (or the mayor directly) to complain.

It's not unusual for arborists to be on the front-lines of protecting trees: Several of the most prominent individual tree protests have been led by arborists, who climb them so they cannot be felled.

'Every single arborist I've ever spoken to in my 25 years in professional arboriculture, every single person says they would rather ask for permission and have a systematic process that asset manages those iconic native trees,' Gosling says.

While some some suburbs have increased overall tree cover, it has come at the expense of tall, mature trees.

His particular concern is giant, native trees, which he says are systematically neglected - he says he often sees native trees, sometimes more than 500 years old, being mismanaged or directly cut down.

Cutting down those trees has flow on effects: Each tree is a galaxy of its own, with a micro-ecosystem of invertebrates and mosses and lichens that go when the tree does.

'They host all that biodiversity - beautiful stick insects, giant centipedes, kauri snails, oodles of them. You're sitting at a mulcher, more or less crying trying to flick away all these giant stick insects from the mulcher,' he says.

'The smaller you look, the bigger the world gets, and the bigger the loss gets.'

Because there's so few asset management tools in place, the big, old trees are often undocumented. Fixing the problem would start there - by identifying these giant and important trees, and putting a management system in place so they can be looked after, Gosling says.

'You protect the leviathans of the ocean, but you don't protect the giant, life-supporting, ecologically important assets.

'The majority of people think that giant native trees on private land are automatically protected because that's what you'd expect - that a 500-year-old tree is going to be managed.'

In Auckland, non-profit group the Tree Council is among those on the front lines. The group serves as a triage point for those who see old mature trees coming down in their neighbourhoods, and feel powerless to stop it.

'We get daily reports from people all over the city concerned the site they've lived near for however many years, which has beautiful mature trees on it, is being cleared, and what can we do about it?' Secretary Dr Mels Barton said.

'There's nothing we can do about it in most cases,'

A beloved manna gum tree, believed to be 90 years old, was cut down by a landowner in Christchurch's Mt Pleasant in 2017.

The group has despaired at the rate of tree loss since 2012, which Barton says appears to be worse than ever. The group is consistently involved in skirmishes to save individual trees; often times they win these battles, but there's no question they are losing the war.

How badly they are losing the war, however, remains a mystery.

The most effective way to measure tree loss is through studying LiDar (Light Detection and Ranging) data, which can be used to calculate the 'canopy cover' of an area.

Two suburbs, different tree cover. Epsom on the left, Mangere on the right.

The most recent analysis of tree cover using LiDar data in Auckland was in 2013, around the time trees first lost their blanket protection. It showed the city's canopy cover was around 18 per cent - on the lower end of normal for comparable cities internationally.

The best way to calculate tree loss would be by comparing new LiDar data to the data collected in 2013.

This has not happened; LiDar data was collected in 2016, but has yet to be analysed by the council, despite promises to do so.

Public release of the analysis was first planned for December 2017, then in August 2018. As of May 2019, no analysis has been released. (Auckland Council was unable to respond to questions regarding the delay before deadline.)

For the Tree Council, the lack of data is a major frustration. When the latest analysis is released, it will already be several years out of date, and missing the recent three year period in which tree loss is likely to have been at its worst.

'We've got absolutely no idea how fast we're losing the trees because nobody keeps any records,' Barton said.

Fendalton on the left, Hornby on the right.

'The council's got no idea what's going on.'

There have been a couple of small glimpses to quantify the scale of tree loss.

The first was a preliminary analysis of the 2016 data for a handful of suburbs, all in South Auckland. It found that not only had there been no overall canopy cover loss, but there had been a growth in cover by 1 per cent between 2013 and 2016.

It's not necessarily good news. South Auckland has much lower tree cover than the city as a whole - parts of Mangere, for example, have just 10 per cent canopy cover - meaning it had fewer trees to lose in the first place.

A century-old pōhutukawa as it was being felled in New Lynn.

It also showed that significant numbers of trees were being felled in each of the suburbs, but were largely being replaced with new plantings.

This presents what is called a succession problem: A new, small planting is no replacement for a tall, mature tree.The six suburbs combined lost nearly a third of trees between 20m and 30m tall; East Tamaki Heights alone lost 60 percent of its trees in that category.

The other attempt to quantify tree loss was far more grim.

A report commissioned by the Waitematā Local Board, released late last year, used aerial image analysis to calculate tree loss in its board area (comprising much of the central city area and its suburban fringes) between 2006 and 2016.

Mature trees cleared for development in Mt Roskill between 2009 (left) and 2018 (right).

Tree advocates were horrified; it showed tens of thousands of trees had been cut down, and in some suburbs, at least a quarter of its canopy cover had been lost. Among them were traditionally 'leafy' suburbs such as Ponsonby, Newmarket, and Grey Lynn.

The board area, as a whole, had lost 61ha of trees (a rugby field is roughly 1ha) in a decade. The vast majority of the trees cut down were on private property, and had no protection at all.

Among those appalled by the data was Dr Margaret Stanley, an ecologist at the University of Auckland.

She likens preserving trees to vaccination: Trees provide not just personal satisfaction, but a collective benefit for the public at large. When everyone vaccinates, we all have herd immunity; when we all preserve trees, we all reap the benefits.

The loss of urban trees threatens these benefits at a time when they are needed more than ever.

A paper Stanley co-authored in 2015, using Auckland as a case study, concluded that individual tree protection was failing - the existing law 'provides insufficient protection to safeguard urban biodiversity,' the paper concluded.

Four years on, and there had been no improvement:

'I think it's obvious that things are getting worse,' Stanley says.

'Tree protection has not improved at all.'

A city without trees has problems. Trees are not just nice to look at: They provide a host of health and environmental benefits.

They produce oxygen, the foundation of our existence, for a start. They also give us shade from the sun, and protection from UV rays; Trees help with flood protection by intercepting rain as it falls, and by absorbing water before it hits our stormwater systems.

They suck carbon from the atmosphere, and serve as a home for birds and lizards and insects that form the basis of our unique ecosystems. Trees form a barrier against noise, and filter out the smog that spews from exhaust pipes. They shield us from the wind and increase house prices and reduce car crashes.

Tress, many studies show, give us something truly unquantifiable: They make us happier.

This is why it's worth looking at trees as a kind of infrastructure, Stanley says. A lot of the 'ecosystem services' they provide are quantifiable: You can put a rough dollar figure on the amount a city saves in other costs thanks to trees.

Some cities put price tags on their urban trees, showing how much they provide in services; In Portland, Oregon, the city offered a 'treebate' - a discount on rates - to anyone who planted a tree on their property.

In 2013, a group of young trees in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter provided on average benefit of around $300 each in services over the course of a year. While it may not sound like a lot, the value of a tree's services grow as they get older. For a species such as pohutukawa, which can live for 1000 years, the value of a single tree could be millions of dollars over its lifespan.

'We seem to be very much of the mindset that what happens on my property is my business, and more concerned with the perceived negative side of trees rather than the benefits they bring,' Stanley says.

'If everyone is cutting down one tree in their backyard it becomes death by a thousand cuts and we all lose the benefits of those trees.'

Aside from the issue of losing trees, the inequity of tree distribution is a problem in New Zealand, too.

A person living in leafy Epsom is more likely to derive the many benefits of trees than someone in Mangere, due to the stark difference in canopy cover.

This phenomenon is similar in Christchurch, which has an overall canopy cover of less than 16 per cent (the city is inherently disadvantaged by its swampiness, which meant even pre-human canopy cover was low). A 2017 analysis found the most forested suburbs included the likes of Cashmere and Fendalton, while the least forested included Hornby and Linwood.

Fixing this deficit will require better planning, Stanley says.

'I think we're not being very clever about how we're doing it,' she says.

'There's plenty of places and cities overseas where they do this well, rather than just do it quick and dirty.'

Cities such as Singapore have increased biodiversity alongside urban intensification, through strict regulation requiring green spaces. Sydney and Melbourne in Australia have targets of 40 per cent tree cover, higher than Auckland's 30 per cent target (Brisbane is already at 49 per cent).

In Auckland, increasing the canopy cover could mean incorporating vegetation into new developments, rather than paving over the land with concrete; It could mean planting more trees in multi-use spaces like golf courses and sports fields and using less artificial turf, and thinking strategically about which trees should be planted where for maximum collective benefit.

The city already had a plan to plant one million trees, with a focus on the suburbs of South Auckland. But the loss of tall urban trees would have to stop, too.

'You really need trees over 15m to 20m high to get those benefits - the stormwater, pollution, carbon storage benefits, but 90 per cent of trees in Auckland are less than 20m high,' Stanley says.

'I guess we're seeing how it could be better, and I think instead of disasterising trees falling down in a storm, we need to get at what the benefits are.'

There are fears the damage may have been done. With so many reports of large trees coming down, and growing pressure to intensify, only a law change would protect the remaining trees.

The coalition government has indicated it will consider the issue under its planned RMA reforms, but any action is likely to be a couple of years away.

'Until the law is changed, nothing will change,' Barton says.

'The council are completely and utterly hamstrung in terms of making trees better protected, there's nothing they can do.

Despite the plan to increase the city's canopy cover by planting more trees, it'll take many decades for them to grow to a size where they can provide the same benefit, if they will even be allowed to grow to that size.

'They'll say you can't let this tree grow any bigger than 5m,' she says. 'You'll never get these trees back.'

Once a tree has been cut down and paved over with concrete, there is no going back. Just the other day, a stand of century old tōtara were cleared near Valley Road, likely for a new development, the shriek of chainsaws returning week after week.

'It's going unnoticed now but I think one day people will look back and think gee, all those good trees that went…' Mandy McMullin says.

'One day people will look back at this time and see it as an era of destruction the same way we look at the loss of the kauri forests.'