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5 Communicator of the year Vol 20 No 47, December 5, 2022
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Growth plan sees forestry boom ahead Richard Rennie
NEWS
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Forestry
TRANSFORMATION plan to move forestry’s focus from logs to high-value wood products will nudge it up the ranks in export earning values if its goals become reality in coming years. So said Minister for Forestry Stuart Nash at the launch of the forestry and wood-processing Industry Transformation Plan (ITP) at Fieldays. He hailed it as an aspirational document providing a roadmap that includes lifting the sector’s export earnings for value-added wood products by $600 million by 2040. With its broad cross-industry support from processors, iwi and politicians, Nash said, the plan is not “some document dreamt up by the Beehive”. “We are talking about a concept not of volume, but of value,” he said. He outlined the plan’s key initiatives, which include diversifying away from pinus radiata to alternative types, to account for 20% of plantings by 2030. At present only about 10% of New Zealand’s exotic plantations are non-radiata. The plan sees planting as a means to improve the sector’s resilience to climate change and to reduce the
biological risk of monocultural plantations. Another initiative is to invest in research identifying how the use of wood products can be increased in mid-rise and commercial construction. At present about 1.4 million cubic metres of wood products are used in construction in NZ every year, and the plan is to lift this by an additional 400,000 cubic metres a year by 2030. The plan also aims to have overall wood processing increase by 3.5 million cubic metres, or 25% by 2030, significantly scaling up domestic processing of underused lower grade logs and reducing the number of unprocessed logs exported. The plan aims for the sector to help reduce national emissions by becoming a source of lowcarbon bio-alternatives to coal. This includes providing over 16 million tonnes of wood fuel to replace coal, producing alternative fuels for transport, and providing 50 million cubic metres of wood biomass to replace 9 billion litres of fossil fuels. Ray Smith, director-general for the Ministry for Primary Industries welcomed the ITP’s launch as critical to the sector’s future. “MPI is keen to grow and support some of what we have lost over time from the sector,” he said. Continued page 7
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