Even if livestock agriculture could technically be
achieved with extremely low emissions, and currently it cannot, other land uses
may be more profitable for New Zealand farmers once the costs of greenhouse
gases and excessive nutrient run-off are fully accounted for.  These could be extension of widely used
existing land uses - forestry, native regeneration or existing fruit or arable
crops - or currently untried or experimental uses.  This talk will briefly review some evidence
on the potential for more forests - including in response to the Freshwater
Reforms - and then discuss why we might want to go beyond existing alternatives
and what would be needed to facilitate more diverse land use.


About Suzi


Suzi Kerr is currently a Senior Fellow at Motu, a
Principal Investigator in Te Punaha Matatini - a Centre of Research Excellence
and an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University. She graduated from Harvard
University in 1995 with a PhD in Economics. From 1998 to 2009 she was Director
and Senior Fellow at Motu. In 2010 she won the NZIER Economics Award. She has
also worked at the University of Maryland at College Park, Resources for the
Future (USA), the Joint Center for the Science and Policy of Global Change at
MIT, and more recently was a Visiting Professor at Stanford University for the
2009/10 year and at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in the
first half of 2014.


Her current research work focuses on climate change. She
empirically and theoretically investigates domestic and international climate
change policy with special emphasis on emissions pricing and land use in both
the tropics and New Zealand. She is Programme Leader for the Impacts and
Implications programme of the Deep South National Science Challenge. She has
previously worked extensively on economic instruments for managing water
quality, fisheries and air quality. She has run four policy dialogue processes,
one in the lead up to the establishment of New Zealand’s emissions trading
system, others on managing water quality in Lake Rotorua, on agricultural
greenhouse gas emissions and (co-led) on New Zealand’s Low Emissions Future,
and she is currently leading a dialogue on New Zealand’s ETS.