Southern North Island Local Section 5th March

Management of Fire in the Forest and Rural Landscape - Future Challenges

Presenter: Murray Dudfield,

Murray was an employee of the NZ Forest Service commencing in 1967 and finished in the role as a Senior Forest Ranger at the time of the demise of the Forest Service in 1987. Moved to the Ministry of Forestry as a Senior Forest Fire Advisor 1987 to 1990 and then fill the role of the NZ National Rural Fire Officer 1990 to 2014. Appointed an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit in 2015. Awarded a FAO Certificate of Excellence for exemplary service to International Cooperation in Wildland Fire Management in 2014. Was a board member of the Australia Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre 2007 to 2014 and a board member of the Otago Rural Fire Authority 2014 to 2017. Is the current Chair of the Forest Fire Committee for the NZ Institute of Forestry.

Date and Time: Thursday 5^th March, 5.15 -7.30pm

Venue:  CBRE, Level 12 Harbour Tower (Old ASB Tower), 2 Hunter Street, Wellington

Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) was established on 1 July 2017 under the Fire and Emergency NZ Act 2017. This Act combined the national urban NZ Fire Service and the decentralized rural fire services into a single entity. From the FENZ 2019/20 Statement of Performance Expectations, it is projected that over the first five years FENZ intends spending an additional $904.2 million on fire services. This is $601.1 million greater than the $303 million approved by Government in 2016 at the time of approving this merger.

The Minister of Internal Affairs announced in October that there will be a review on how FENZ is funded. If a change is made by Government to move from an insurance based fire levy, to a land based fire levy, what will be the potential impact on the forestry sector given the projected large increased expenditure on fire services by FENZ since July 2017.

Under the FENZ structure a large forest fire occurred on the 5th February 2019 in Pigeon Valley. This involved a loss of more than 2,300 hectares of forested lands located 30km southwest of Nelson. Did the fire weather environment during the first few days of this fire support the decisions to construct firebreaks, external to the plantation, and the evacuation of people from communities to the south-east of this wildfire.

With a cost of more than $17 million the February 2019 Pigeon Valley wildfire is the most expensive vegetation fire in the history of New Zealand. It has also been claimed by some as the most destructive plantation fire in the past 60 years. When compared with data from four other forest fires it shows that the fire environment in the first five days of this Pigeon Valley fire does not warrant this characterisation.

RSVP Peter Hill   [email protected]

CNI Local Section Evening

We would like to extend a warm welcome to our next Central North Island local section evening meeting on Thursday 20^th February 2020

In the first meeting of the CNI local section for 2020 we want to start with a bang and engage in some of the big national forestry sector issues.

 Jeff Tombleson and Graham West will be providing updated presentations that were recently prepared for major conferences. Focusing on the need to rapidly expand the forest estate on farmland with the goal of making a major contribution towards achieving carbon zero 2050? What is the role of the NZIF?

Key issues include; on what land should this estate be grown, how rapidly does it need to be established, how much area is required by 2030 and 2050, what will it take to create landowner buy-in, does it require subsidisation, what species, and what management?  

Jeff Tombleson’s presentation is titled “The contribution of plantations to achieving carbon zero 2050” as presented to the VII Chilean Forestry Science Congress on Climate Change. Jeff has maintained engagement into Chile for 20 years and on this occasion was engaged by CMPC that is headquartered in Chile and is one of the largest forestry companies in the world with 638,000 hectares of plantations. Jeff’s presentation will also contain insights into forestry in Chile’s warming climate and how a mega forestry corporate has rebranded to positively address the same environmental issues as those faced by the NZ forest industry – but on a colossal and concerning scale.   

Graham West addresses the question “should the development of small scale forests be on fast forward in NZ?”, provided to the 2019 NZ FFA Annual Conference. What’s at stake?, who will make it happen? What is the Farm Forestry Association doing about it? Graham is chairman of the BOP NZ FFA Branch and was chairman of the May 2019 NZ FFA annual conference organising committee that had the theme “Fast Forward”. A key message was that “we have a once in a generation opportunity to put NZ and our primary industries on a more sustainable footing for the next 30 years”.

Venue: Room O3, the Forestry school at Toi Ohomai

There will be drinks and nibbles from 5.30 and the speakers will start at approximately 6 pm.

Please RSVP to [email protected] if you plan to attend.