Highland researchers offer a boost for forestry firms
Researchers at Inverness College UHI are working with partners in Finland, Sweden and Ireland to help forestry service companies improve workforce skills and expand their business opportunities. The three-year, Europe-wide Forest Business Innovation and Advancement project, will see Euan Bowditch and Elspeth McDonald, of the university’s forestry research department, work with contractors, harvesters, and tree planters from the private sector in Scotland to identify gaps in knowledge and new opportunities. It aims to create a digital education platform, which will include new training opportunities, examples of best practice, partnership working models and planning tools. Read more...
Researchers at Inverness College UHI are working with partners in Finland, Sweden and Ireland to help forestry service companies improve workforce skills and expand their business opportunities. The three-year, Europe-wide Forest Business Innovation and Advancement project, will see Euan Bowditch and Elspeth McDonald, of the university’s forestry research department, work with contractors, harvesters, and tree planters from the private sector in Scotland to identify gaps in knowledge and new opportunities. It aims to create a digital education platform, which will include new training opportunities, examples of best practice, partnership working models and planning tools. Read more...
NZ Government to fund 500,000 trees in the next 10 years
There has been woeful progress in recent years on forestry planting. Flip flops on the emissions trading scheme made so-called 'carbon farming' – getting paid to store carbon in forests – unattractive. Committing capital to a 30-year growing cycle is hard when the policy changes with the three year electoral cycle. Forestry Minister Shane Jones has symbolically planted the first five of the 500,000 trees the government plans to fund over the next 10 years – matched by 500,000 to be planted by private sector forestry investors. Now he needs to swiftly identify land to accommodate such plantings.
New ways to fund and reward such planting will also need to emerge and offer more than just the value of the ETS carbon credits. One possible answer: a social impact bonds-style approach. This would see the Crown, as the beneficiary of stored carbon to avoid open-ended costs of failing to meet international carbon reduction targets, make an annual payment to forest owners for maintaining such forests.
Interesting potential may emerge for long-term income streams to marginal land owners and communally-owned Maori land that has proven difficult to put to commercial use. Many sheep and beef farmers may find they can make better money from trees than ruminants.
The second caveat is that not all these forests can be planted for eventual harvest. Rather, much of that planting should occur on marginal, erosion-prone farmland and be left in place.
Some of it should be native forest planting, but much will need to be fast-growing species like pine, since native forests are slower-growing and won't help the country to meet its carbon targets quickly enough. Read more...
There has been woeful progress in recent years on forestry planting. Flip flops on the emissions trading scheme made so-called 'carbon farming' – getting paid to store carbon in forests – unattractive. Committing capital to a 30-year growing cycle is hard when the policy changes with the three year electoral cycle. Forestry Minister Shane Jones has symbolically planted the first five of the 500,000 trees the government plans to fund over the next 10 years – matched by 500,000 to be planted by private sector forestry investors. Now he needs to swiftly identify land to accommodate such plantings.
New ways to fund and reward such planting will also need to emerge and offer more than just the value of the ETS carbon credits. One possible answer: a social impact bonds-style approach. This would see the Crown, as the beneficiary of stored carbon to avoid open-ended costs of failing to meet international carbon reduction targets, make an annual payment to forest owners for maintaining such forests.
Interesting potential may emerge for long-term income streams to marginal land owners and communally-owned Maori land that has proven difficult to put to commercial use. Many sheep and beef farmers may find they can make better money from trees than ruminants.
The second caveat is that not all these forests can be planted for eventual harvest. Rather, much of that planting should occur on marginal, erosion-prone farmland and be left in place.
Some of it should be native forest planting, but much will need to be fast-growing species like pine, since native forests are slower-growing and won't help the country to meet its carbon targets quickly enough. Read more...
CZECH FOREST HELPS NASA PLOT CLIMATE CHANGE
The Žofín forest in South Bohemia belongs among the oldest protected nature reserves in Central Europe. This unique woodland, which has been protected for more than 180 years, has now become a focus of research carried out by the US space agency NASA. They want to use the data collected in the forest to compare it with measurements taken from space. That could enable them to get a more accurate picture of the Earth’s surface. Read more...
The Žofín forest in South Bohemia belongs among the oldest protected nature reserves in Central Europe. This unique woodland, which has been protected for more than 180 years, has now become a focus of research carried out by the US space agency NASA. They want to use the data collected in the forest to compare it with measurements taken from space. That could enable them to get a more accurate picture of the Earth’s surface. Read more...
