Clear-felling forest must stop in Tairāwhiti, expert says

Forestry Slash on the East Coast. Photo: NZDF

Clear-felling is inappropriate for fragile East Coast land - and Indigenous voices must lead the change, an expert says.

Nathanael Melia, senior research fellow at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, says that when the catchments contained only standing forest in the decades following Cyclone Bola, “all was calm” in the Tairāwhiti region.