Three years after Cyclone Gabrielle ripped silt, logs and forestry slash through the Tairāwhiti region, new research from Lincoln University has found that the central recommendations of the 2023 ministerial inquiry have largely failed to make it into the resource consents being granted to foresters in the worst-affected catchments.
The findings, published as an analysis in The Conversation and reported by RNZ, come from Steve Urlich, a senior lecturer in environmental management at Lincoln, and postgraduate student Alex Williamson. The pair obtained every Resource Management Act consent application for forestry harvesting issued in Tairāwhiti from the time of the May 2023 inquiry through to July 2025, along with the council decision documents that followed.
What they found suggests the rules on the ground have barely moved. Of the six consent applications and council decisions analysed, only one partially limited the harvest area, and that was because the block formed part of a water supply catchment. The remaining five imposed no explicit restriction on the size of clear-cut blocks and did not require neighbouring areas to “green up” before harvesting continued next door. None of the consents excluded headwater basins or steep gully systems from harvesting, even though those landforms are recognised as being particularly prone to triggering debris flows in heavy rain.
The 2023 ministerial inquiry, set up after Gabrielle smashed bridges, buried farmland and sent rafts of forestry debris through Esk Valley, Wairoa and the East Coast, singled out large clear-cut blocks as a key driver of slash and erosion damage. Its panel recommended a 40 hectare cap on individual harvests, a five-year green-up period between adjoining sites and a rule that no more than 5 percent of any catchment be harvested in a single year. The then Labour-led government accepted those recommendations and tasked officials to work with Gisborne District Council on tightening consents and updating the Tairāwhiti Resource Management Plan.
What did not happen, according to the Lincoln research, was any change to the National Environmental Standards for Commercial Forestry, the national rulebook that sits above council plans. Instead, regional councils were left to write tougher rules themselves, on a case-by-case basis. The new analysis suggests that approach has produced very little tightening in practice.
Urlich and Williamson note that scientists later mapped more than 116,000 landslides triggered by Gabrielle, and that steep slopes harvested three to five years before the cyclone, the so-called “window of vulnerability” between mature trees being felled and seedlings re-establishing soil-binding root systems, suffered significantly more landsliding than other forested areas. Their concern is that, with consent conditions still allowing very large contiguous clear-cuts, the same window of vulnerability is being recreated across new blocks of Tairāwhiti hill country every year.
The timing of the research is sharp. The coalition government halted most council plan changes in August 2025 ahead of broader Resource Management Act reform, freezing the Gisborne council’s ability to push through a stricter regional plan. At the same time, the government is rewriting the National Environmental Standards for Commercial Forestry to allow foresters to leave more slash on site in areas categorised as lower risk. Detailed guidance on which areas qualify is still being developed and, the researchers say, the consultation window for that guidance will be limited. The reforms also curtail councils’ ability to set tougher rules of their own, narrowing the window in which local authorities can respond to specific catchment risks.
Gisborne District Council carried out an aerial survey of forestry catchments in late 2024 and raised concerns about both the volume and the location of slash piles still sitting on hillsides. The council is now seeking an exemption from the central government moratorium on plan changes so it can introduce stricter rules for steep land. The Lincoln researchers point out that the government has at the same time declined to fund a transition away from clear-felling in the most erosion-prone country, leaving the council to manage the risk consent by consent rather than through a strengthened regional plan.
For East Coast communities still dealing with the legacy of Gabrielle, the research is likely to land hard. Esk Valley orchards, Wairoa farms and Tolaga Bay beaches were piled with woody debris for months after the cyclone, and some properties were rendered uninsurable. Local marae and hapū raised concerns at the time about the loss of kaitiakitanga over rivers and coastlines that had been turned into log yards.
The authors also draw a comparison with Washington State in the United States, where headwater basins and gully systems have long been treated as requiring specialist geotechnical oversight and are often excluded from harvesting altogether to protect downstream slope stability. None of the Tairāwhiti consents reviewed by Urlich and Williamson applied that kind of exclusion.
The pair argue New Zealand could choose a different path, including amending the Emissions Trading Scheme so that legacy plantings on unstable steep land are not locked into ongoing harvest cycles by carbon obligations. Without such changes, they conclude, regional communities and taxpayers are likely to keep paying the cleanup bill the next time a serious storm crosses the East Coast.
Forestry industry representatives have previously argued that the sector has invested heavily since 2023 in better engineering of skid sites, debris recovery and harvest planning, and that storms of Gabrielle’s magnitude would overwhelm any harvesting regime. The Lincoln research does not dispute those investments, but suggests the structural drivers of risk, particularly the size of clear-cut blocks and the harvesting of steep gully heads, have not yet been addressed in the consent record.
Have you seen forestry slash damage in your own region, or do you live downstream of working pine blocks? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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