Tom Kennedy has made a submission about the National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry.
Below is the overview, if you would like to read the whole document you can down load it by clicking on this link FoM submission on National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry.
Submission Overview
This submission opposes the NES-PF in its current form. There are many areas of concern to our group and we have little faith that the new standard will stop the further deterioration of our rivers in terms of decreasing biodiversity, sediment deposition and increased levels of nitrogen.
We can appreciate the desire for Forestry Companies to have consistent rules throughout the country but New Zealand has a complex and varied geology so that many regions have issues unique to their area. As it stands at present the NES-PF does not have the detail in its rules, and reclassification of ESC, to adequately cope with these regional variations so that having an inadequate set of albeit consistent rules will be at the expense of the environment.
In Nelson this broad brush approach of reclassifying all of the ‘high’ ESC land in the plantation forestry areas of the Maitai catchment to ‘moderate’ will make it extremely difficult to ensure adequate monitoring and protection for what is now already a fragile area.
Riparian setbacks are also inadequate under the permitted rules and there has been a history of ignoring the requirement for setbacks, so that many streams (e.g. Packer, Groom and Sharland) have had them removed or damaged over the past years of forestry operations.
We have little faith that the rules as they now exist will allow any improvement in the state of our river.
To read the submission by Joe Hay please use this link Joe Hay NES-PF submission points