Forestry reform proposals won’t solve the country’s slash problem

Monday, 9 June 2025

Dr Steve Urlich is a senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental Management at Lincoln University. Dr Mark Bloomberg is an adjunct senior fellow in the School of Forestry at the University of Canterbury.

OPINION: Pine forestry is an important economic industry in regional New Zealand. It contributes approximately $6 billion to the national economy annually, and employs about 42,000 people.

However, its large-scale clear-cut harvesting and earthworks practices on steep erosion-prone hill country have contributed to catastrophic downstream damage after cyclones and atmospheric rivers in Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay, Coromandel, Marlborough, Nelson, and Tasman since 2010.

The coalition Government aims to restore public confidence in the industry with its recently announced package of resource management reforms.

However, its policy initiatives for changing the national forestry standards will likely do the reverse.

This is because the proposed changes do not address the core reasons that forestry practices are poorly adapted to adverse weather events and the associated regulatory failure to mitigate impacts.

Consequently, extensive clear-cutting on erosion-prone land will continue to contribute to the destruction of regional infrastructure and housing, damage to farms and orchards in the lowlands, elevated risk to life, and ecological devastation to rivers and coastal areas.

In addition to the impacts on communities, there are substantial negative impacts to the economy regionally and nationally. The Treasury estimated the costs of Cyclone Gabrielle and floods to be between $9 billion to $14b, with the Government paying close to $5b.

In Budget 2025, the Treasury advised the Minister of Finance that it was now including a specific fiscal risk of adverse weather events in projected government expenditure, as “it is reasonably possible that such an event will occur within the forecast period [as] recent history shows that such events occur at least once every four years”.

In this light, environmental policies should be focused within the resource management reform on mitigating the risks to the nation’s financial sustainability, ecology, and community health and safety.

Instead, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) in its Regulatory Impact Statement defines the problems facing foresters as the cost of regulations that protect the environment, including:

• Regional councils having too much leeway to introduce more stringent regulations for freshwater ecosystems, thus leading to uncertainty and additional cost for foresters.

• Management rules for slash (stumps, branches, tops and broken stems) are not fit for purpose, leading to uncertainty and cost for foresters and councils in determining compliance.

These are not the actual core problems, rather they are implementation issues that partly arise from, and do not solve, the existing inadequacies and omissions within the national forestry standards.

From extensive research, we see the problem definition with the national standards as follows:

• No limit on clear-cut size as a proportion of catchment area in erosion-prone hill country.

• No restrictions on clear-cutting on steep erosion-prone faces and in deep gullies.

• Inadequate rules that treat steep erosion-prone land as if it was ordinary hill country.

• Planting, harvesting, and replanting of large forest areas on erosion-prone land, thereby perpetuating erosion and slash problems in risky areas.

MPI have acknowledged that its rushed attempt to regulate slash after Cyclone-Gabrielle has now failed. There is a pipeline of slash on hill slopes and in gullies that is relatively inaccessible and/or too dangerous and expensive to remove.

Instead of preventing slash creation in gullies and on overly steep side slopes, MPI is proposing to tinker with the slash rules to reduce costs to foresters, due to supposed unclear environmental benefits. MPI did not establish any environmental monitoring of the effectiveness of slash changes.

In addition, there is no monitoring required by foresters of their effects on water quality, as MPI acknowledges. Regional councils also do not adequately monitor water quality to understand how individual forestry activities in catchments affect important rivers, lakes and coastal areas.

In a circular argument within the regulatory impact statement, MPI pointed to a successful court appeal by foresters that Environment Canterbury failed to justify greater stringency of water quality standards due to a lack of robust monitoring data, as evidence of a problem with stringency itself.

MPI has also failed to provide a principled set of stringency criteria for regional councils to apply strategically in their regional plan reviews, nor mandated a time frame for doing so. Perversely, this adds to the uncertainty and costs of compliance that foresters face.

The failure to prepare for, and mitigate, the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle and other intense rainfall events extends to regional councils. No regional council has taken a strategic and principled approach to amend its regional plans This failure exposes their communities to elevated risks.

MPI’s proposal for amending the national forestry standards will continue to permit councils to place greater controls on clear-cutting and earthworks; however, given that many councils have failed to implement other national policy statements due to resourcing problems and/or frequent policy changes, forestry issues will likely continue.

The Treasury has drawn the Government’s attention to the increasing frequency of adverse weather events and the costs to society of not adequately preparing for these. The regulatory issues with forestry on steep lands run deep, and change is urgently needed to protect people and the economy.

This extends to the principle of the Regulatory Standards Bill which may require councils to pay foresters “fair compensation” if they “impair property without the owner’s consent”. Councils may be unable to afford greater stringency to protect communities and the environment.

Steep land forests reflect a tightly connected relationship of people, the environment and the economy. They are too important to be managed as they are currently. It is now an emergency to fix the national standards properly this time, as the effects of climate change begin to hit home.

* _Submissions on the coalition Government’s resource management reform proposals close on July _27,_ 2025 (visit_ www.mfe.govt.nz ).