New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme and Land Use Patterns

Investigator: 
Kathryn McConnell
Advisor: 
Justin Farrell
Start Date: 
May, 2017
Description: 

New Zealand’s introduction of a country-wide Emissions Trading Scheme linked the forestry sector to broader price trends of the New Zealand Unit (NZU) – the newly created emissions currency. When NZU value declined dramatically around 2012, researchers hypothesized that plantation forests were being converted to dairy production, an unregulated land use under the Trading Scheme. If this trend were to be confirmed at a large scale, it would raise significant questions regarding the ability of the Trading Scheme to effectively decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

Most research on this topic focuses on economic data or qualitative interviews; physical land changes have not been systematically analyzed to investigate the forest to dairy conversion hypothesis. This project attempts to determine whether such a land use change can be detected from satellite imagery.