Carbon Farming Newsletter

ETS Review

Climate Change Minister Nick Smith, recently announced the terms of reference of a scheduled review of the ETS. The terms of reference can be viewed here . This review is not to debate the existence of the ETS but rather to assess if the current format is appropriate to meet New Zealand’s Kyoto obligations at the least cost. The members of the review panel are:

• David Caygill (chair)
• Tom Lambie
• Geoff Thompson
• Julia Hoare
• Chris Insley
• David Russell

The review panel are expected to report to the government by 30 June 2011. See the press release about the review here.

Climate Change Glossary of Terms

We’ve had several requests for an easy-to-understand glossary of carbon farming terms.  After a bit of research we’ve found a very good one on the Ministry for the Environment’s website. Click here to see their Climate Change Glossary of Terms.

Carbon Calculator Update

Our carbon calculator has been significantly upgraded to incorporate the passing of the Climate Change (Agriculture Sector) Regulations 2010. You can now estimate the emissions and resulting cost to your farm by inputting either, kgMS, or animal numbers and average kg of animal type sent to slaughter.  To try out our new calculator click here.

CFG Web Stats

The Carbon Farming Group website continues to receive more and more web traffic with January 2011 being the biggest yet. The following are some of January's stats:

• 4800 sessions (unique visitors) on the site, average of 155 per day
• The average session length was 4minutes and 6 seconds, therefore
• Total visitor time on the website totaled 328 hours
• Visitors downloaded over 1000 documents from the website.