Summary

In their technical papers on aspects of tree development in coastal areas Prasetya (2006) and Takle et al (2006) discuss a number of important factors that determine how best to use trees and forests to combat coastal erosion, wind and the debilitating effects of salt spray. The principles and techniques they describe can be used to determine not only the most effective methods for establishing and using trees, but are also important pointers to the species most likely to survive and do well in such situations. This paper describes an example from New Zealand of severe coastal erosion arising from inappropriate land use, leading to the wide-scale release of partially consolidated coastal sand-dunes during settlement of the country. Adopting many of the principles and techniques described by Takle and Prasetya has led to the problem largely being over come. Although in this case it is likely that careless landuse created much of the problem, it could equally have arisen as a consequence of vegetation removal via extreme drought, fire, tsunami, or earthquake and the consequences would have been the same. An important feature of the New Zealand programme is that much of the erosion involved tribally owned lands, and through direct involvement in the restoration and subsequent commercial forest harvesting activities local people have gainful employment and social and community development has occurred