MAF has released its annual survey of deforestation intentions, aimed at predicting deforestation rates, and it has some good news: deforestation is expected to decline by 75% due to the government's ETS. The 2006 survey predicted around 50,000 hectares of deforestation over CP1, but the 2007 survey shows this will reduce to 12,000 hectares. In carbon terms, that's around 30 MTCO2-e - a figure that will make a substantial difference to our performance over CP1 (primarily by shifting our forestry emissions from the high scenario to a much lower one).
The survey also gives us a good reason to implement the ETS as proposed rather than weakening it to allow greater land-use flexibility: such a move would result in deforestation ballooning to 31,000 hectares, effectively making us 15 MTCO2-e (and about NZ$375 million) worse off. This is simply not a change we can afford to make.
