By MARTA STEEMAN
Forestry investors are calling on the Government to relinquish carbon credits from forests and allow forest owners to own and trade them
They say the Government's embarrassing Kyoto blunder would be solved because forestry would be much more economic with carbon credits and planting would take off again. Plantings after 1990 create carbon sinks, which earn credits.

Roger Dickie, spokesman for the Kyoto Forestry Association representing investors, said the Government should implement a free-market approach to the Kyoto protocol. The unpopular and unnecessary carbon tax could then be dropped.
Credits should be allocated to all forestry planting, not just to "permanent forest sinks".
"That way there will be a massive amount of planting...
"By 2012 we would probably be back in credit again at no cost to the government."
Tree plantings, which had plummeted to nearly zero, would return to 1990 levels of more than 50,000ha a year.
The Government has nationalised New Zealand's carbon credits. It has said it might allow carbon credit trading from 2012.
Last week it revealed New Zealand taxpayers faced a bill of at least $500m to buy carbon credits in the first commitment period, 2008-2012, under the protocol.
Mr Dickie said the Government's policy of carbon credits for "permanent forest sinks" which could not be harvested for 35 years was impractical and did not encourage planting by mainstream plantation forest owners
"Why don't they just let forest owners get on with their business?"
The credits would make "quite a substantial difference to the economics of planting a forest", he said.
"We've got some figures that suggest the return changes dramatically. It was so huge we decided we'd get them researched by some other independent consultants and we will have those figures out sometime in the next week or so.
"But it looks as though the returns for planting a forest and growing it would more than double. When log prices go down the returns from other aspects like your forest sink credits as a percentage become more important.
"People are just totally turned off by what the Government has done to the forest owners here. It's our trees, it's our credits."
New tree planting had fallen from a peak of 100,000ha in 1994 to 10,000ha last year.
Yesterday Mr Dickie presented the association's submission to the parliamentary commerce select committee on the Climate Change Response Amendment Bill.
The submission urged the Government to leave the rights and obligations associated with carbon credits to the organisations and individuals who earned them, to require industries and organisations that created liabilities to obtain credits and to provide a mechanism for trading credits.