All three forest stands are of high quality and are healthy.
Ramshead (81ha). Silviculture was completed a year ago. This crop is healthy and having another good growth season. These trees have ideal form.
Paratu (33ha). Silviculture was completed last autumn, and a heavy wet snowfall worried us briefly. No significant damage occurred nor was there any from high winds last spring. This crop too is healthy and having another good growth season. It too has very good form.
Chimney Creek (162ha). Only a small area (12ha), a year younger than the rest, remains to be finally pruned and thinned this year. There remains 20ha at the top of the site, which is reasonably exposed and we calculate is best left unpruned at a high stocking to produce high grade framing timber. We will ask the Partnership's Consultant to confirm (or otherwise) this change to the Forest Management Plan.
While your beautiful trees are quietly sucking up lots of lovely CO2, you may be following the argument many forest owners are having with the government over their proposed Kyoto Protocol policies. The latest ones attempt to divide growers into three 'Kyoto defined' groups, but as is so often the case with dumb government, the result will be the opposite intended. We are all united now in our view their policies are wrong, again. We are happy to help with the rising CO2 problem, but a Kyoto inspired bureaucracy is not the way.
There is growing acceptance this Euro-Japanese treaty should not have been ratified by our government, or ratified but not acted on as has been the case in most other countries. I predict it will be eclipsed in a couple of years by a global treaty, probably phasing in a simple global carbon tax on fossil fuels. As I read it, it has become clear to policy makers that Kyoto will fail to reduce CO2 emissions at all. So something better and global is vital. In Europe, CO2 emissions have increased or been redistributed east and like here many countries are way way off target. It is helping accelerate deforestation in NZ and may do so elsewhere too if persisted with. The US will never join it (even Al Gore voted against it) but they will lead the shaping of its replacement. Their own corporate & government climate change polices and actions are now arguably ahead of Europe & certainly ahead of us and so Kyoto looks increasingly like a failure rather than the way to go.
While in fortune telling mood, I also predict in a couple of years the Bush, Blair, Howard and Clark regimes will all have been consigned to the dustbin too. These two sets of predictions are connected of course.
Kind regards,
Charles Etherington,
Manager
Warren Forestry Ltd
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Warren Forestry Ltd. PO Box 36-358, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tel/Fax: +64 3 377 3514/366 5669. Email: office@warrenforestry.com
