New Zealand leads the world in many aspects of conservation, but is very immature and conflicted in sustaining indigenous forest as part of our working landscape. Lessons learnt from successes and from disasters elsewhere can be combined with locally developed knowledge to accelerate the development of the mature culture that the sustainability challenge demands of us.

As we abandon harvest of old growth forest we loose access to native timber as a defining part of our society unless we can create sustainable alternatives. Equally, failing to value productive indigenous forests as part of our economy, we define an exotic or treeless future for much of our landscape.

Re-foresting New Zealand draws together the technologies of silviculture and ecosystem restoration. It combines the traditional practices that have sustained the forests of Europe and Japan with the indigenous practices of the iwi of Aotearoa. It then blends in twenty first century insights into the management of genetic resources and the importance of effective carbon sequestration.

There are five intertwined strands to the programme:

1. Tracking, documenting and encouraging use of high quality and genetically diverse locally sourced cultivars of native timber trees

2. Recognition and protection of elite stands of native timber trees that provide our seed sources for the future

3. Targeted restoration of native forest in threatened ecosystems through new plantings of sustainably managed native forest

4. Sustained effective contributions to carbon sequestration

5. Sustainable development of permanent-canopy ecological silviculture.