Government cash for wilding pine clearance is dwindling and despair is setting in as the trees continue to spread
As money for the fight against wilding pines gets tighter, those at the frontline fear Central Otago’s No 1 weed is gaining the upper hand.
“The funding heyday is past. It’s a battleground at the moment and it’s anyone’s guess which way it’s going to go,” says Central Otago Wilding Conifer Control Group project manager Pete Oswald.
On private and public land where grazing-stock numbers have fallen, wild conifers are taking off, sometimes alongside woody natives.
“They are competing and the conifers are winning every time. Natives are much slower-growing in grassland and the conifer is a coloniser – that’s just what it does,” Oswald says.
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Wildings, including the prolific Pinus contorta, are populating the Kakanui Range, Loganburn Reservoir area near Middlemarch, St Bathans and Oteake Conservation Park.
Across the whole province fast-growing Pinus radiata and hardy Pinus nigra, in particular, are an ongoing threat to landscapes despite hundreds being removed in the past three years.
In 2020 a post-Covid $100 million government funding boost enabled control groups to launch work programmes across the country.
Three years on the money is largely spent and Oswald says in Central Otago they’re now prioritising projects.
With regular calls from farmers “in despair” about how to tackle the spreading trees, the focus is on rural hillsides rather than the urban fringe.
“In places like the Kakanuis there’s contorta seedling growth and if they get to coning age that area won’t be able to be saved – it will be ineradicable.”
The species was popular for shelter-belt planting before its vigour as a spreader was known.
He says in areas where there is existing native bush, shade-loving Douglas fir trees are getting established and “destroying it from within”.
“People won’t realise what they have to lose until it’s gone.”
He says some landowners struggle to know where to start in places where wildings are spreading thick and fast.
“But we can always help … even without much money we can provide tools, sometimes herbicides.
“We can lay out a strategy, advise them on how best to contain and control an infestation and show that it is achievable.”
He says where wildings have been removed there are “really awesome” patches of native species – kōwhai, mānuka and tōtara – regenerating.
Rewarding results
Tackling well-established wildings near urban areas can be challenging as residents value them for shade, shelter and privacy.
The regeneration of natives, however, shows how such sacrifices could be rewarded.
Those established in the Cromwell Gorge were now safe from being smothered after nearby wilding infestations were cleared by the group on private land ending decades of seed spread.
At Half Mile in Alexandra, though, a recent urban-fringe pine clearance by the Central Otago District Council became a public-relations disaster.
Residents long used to walking and cycling in the forest learnt via local media that the trees were to be felled within weeks without consultation.
More than 18 months of debate, report-writing, legal wrangling, rising costs and general ill-feeling ensued before the trees finally came down.
Asked what lessons had been learnt from the experience, council community-experience group manager David Scoones says it’s been acknowledged several times that the process could have been better.
“Members of the community have engaged directly with staff through drop-in sessions and direct contact where staff and elected members have offered apologies for the initial way the felling was announced.”
He says despite this some people had been intent on painting the council as an organisation that didn’t care about the community.
“Council will continue to make decisions that not everyone will agree with but are in the interests of the community at large and not for just a few.
“For making hard decisions that have the best future outcomes for our place, we don’t apologise.”
The council is into its last year of funding earmarked for wilding control and will need financial support to continue the work, parks and recreation manager Gordon Bailey says.
Falling funding
Oswald says community-based wilding control groups work as a network across the country.
If one area manages to get on top of the problem but its neighbours don’t it’s just a matter of time before new wildings invade.
To date Central Otago has not attracted companies looking to offset carbon emissions by buying whole farms for planting in pines, but Oswald is far from relaxed about that.
The government’s national environmental standards for plantation forestry are under review and large-scale planting is under way elsewhere in Otago, Southland Canterbury.
Pinus radiata seedlings, which are being planted by the tens of thousands, spread more quickly in Central Otago than elsewhere.
“If there’s spread, their problem will become our problem.”
John Sanson, Biosecurity New Zealand’s manager of pest management, says wildings are threatening almost every type of landscape from dune lakes in the Far North and thermal landscapes in the Central North Island to coastal areas, high-country tussock and pastoral land and beech forest.
The government’s national fund boost was allocated as $32.5 million in 2020 and 2021, $25 million in 2022 and $10 million this year.
From 2024 $10 million will be available each year, the first secure ongoing funding for wilding control.
Conifer-clearance groups say the funding reduction will reduce their momentum.
But Sanson says today’s infestation would be larger, more dense and more expensive to control if not for the accelerated control undertaken since 2020.
He says the national programme’s 2015 to 2030 strategy aims to prevent further spread and contain or eradicate wilding conifers in established areas by 2030.
“The programme has identified the total area of wilding conifer infestation and spread is larger than was known when this strategy was released.
“But we are still working towards that goal and have achieved excellent results with the $140 million of total Crown funding to date.”
Representatives from the government and clearance groups will attend a three-day conference in Queenstown in October to discuss funding, fire risk, biodiversity, production forestry and myriad other wilding-pine issues.
Made with the support of the Public Interest Journalism Fund
