Recently in Sustainable Forestry Category
The threat is dire. "No tropical forest on earth has come closer to total destruction," says Claudia Picone, an information resource coordinator for The Nature Conservancy.
The Atlantic Forest is a spectacularly complex and biologically diverse expanse of tropical rainforest on the coast of Brazil. Once twice the size of Texas, only 7 percent of the original forest remains—it has been ravaged by ranching, illegal logging, agriculture, and other pressures.
The campaign to plant one billion trees in the Atlantic Forest continues The Nature Conservancy's mighty efforts to preserve the very special ecosystem. According to Picone, "We've finally turned the corner, and people are starting to realize that there are economic benefits to leaving the forest standing instead of cutting it down."
Since The Nature Conservancy's founding in 1951, it has protected more than 117 million acres of land and 5,000 miles of rivers around the world. The group has more than a million members and works in all 50 states and more than 30 countries.
Give to the Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees campaign
www.plantabillion.org
To prepare businesses for this new landscape, three organizations have launched a set of guidelines designed to help companies proactively develop strategies to manage risks and opportunities arising from ecosystem degradation.
The guidelines, called the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review (3.5 MB)
were developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration
with the Meridian Institute and World Business Council for Sustainable
Development (WBCSD). Five WBCSD members - Akzo Nobel, BC Hydro, Mondi,
Rio Tinto, and Syngenta - "road-tested" the methodology and provided
input to its design.
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Ecosystems provide companies with a wide variety of benefits or services including
- Freshwater
- Wood
- Pollination
- Climate regulation
- Protection from natural hazards,
"Ecosystem services are often unacknowledged, yet they underpin many corporate activities," said John Ehrmann, Managing Partner of the Meridian Institute. "I am pleased with the feedback from company managers who are finding the guidelines helpful for developing strategies that improve both corporate performance and ecosystem stewardship."
Guideline Benefits
The road-testers found that the guidelines can provide a number of other benefits as well.- They can help companies anticipate new markets and government policies that may emerge in response to ecosystem degradation.
- They can strengthen corporate environmental impact assessments by adding considerations traditional methods may overlook.
- They also can help companies better manage conflicts over resources, identifying options for better trade-offs between ecosystem services.
"The methodology helped us identify and rank emerging problems, and provided us with a framework for turning risks into opportunities," said Peter Gardiner, natural resources manager at Mondi, a leading international paper and packaging manufacturer.
Mondi's newfound strategies include a number of operational changes that will increase the company's efficiency in using freshwater, a scarce ecosystem service, and lead to new markets for the company's byproducts.
"The Corporate Ecosystem Review helped us to better understand how a number of emerging environmental changes are likely to affect our business and how our company might best position itself to respond to these changes," said Steve Hunt, Senior Vice President, Asia-Pacific, Eka Chemicals, a division of chemical giant Akzo Nobel.
Some road-testers, such as Mondi and BC Hydro, used the guidelines to gain insight into the direct implications that ecosystem trends pose for them.
Other road-testers, such as Akzo Nobel and Syngenta, applied the methodology to understand the risks faced by a segment of their customers due to ecosystem degradation and, in turn, discovered opportunities for new products or services that address these risks. The guidelines profile these and other road-test experiences.
"We're going to be hearing a lot about the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review. A couple dozen more WBCSD members are already taking it up this year," said Björn Stigson, President of the WBCSD. "Leading companies realize that they need to be prepared for the business challenges posed by ecosystem decline."
Download Corporate Ecosystem Services Review"
About the sponsors of this ecosystem review
The World Resources Institute is an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit organization with a staff of more than 100 scientists, economists, policy experts, business analysts, statistical analysts, mapmakers, and communicators developing and promoting policies that will help protect the Earth and improve people's lives.The Meridian Institute is a neutral, nonprofit organization that helps decision-makers and diverse stakeholders address society's most contentious public policy issues through process design and facilitation.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development brings together some 200 international companies in a shared commitment to sustainable development through economic growth, ecological balance, and social progress.
San Francisco, CA — February 19, 2008 — The Nature Conservancy congratulated the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) for its vote today to adopt a trend-setting forest investment policy that requires certified sustainable forest management and positions CalPERS to profit from the rapidly emerging global market in forest carbon credits.
The Nature Conservancy Helps Pension Fund Craft Environmentally Sound Policy
“This leading-edge policy will direct $2.4 billion in CalPERS investments toward environmentally friendly forest projects. That level of investment provides a strong incentive to the global timber industry to engage in certified sustainable timber management,” said Mike Sweeney, Executive Director of the California Chapter of The Nature Conservancy. “Good forest management provides healthy returns – for investors and for the planet.”The Nature Conservancy began to work with CalPERS in the early stages of this new policy. "CalPERS action can influence other institutional investors and the timber industry," said Louis Blumberg, director of The Nature Conservancy’s California forest and climate policy program. The Nature Conservancy offers their experience with sustainable forestry and certification and to help create a policy that strengthens the CalPERS' long term asset while protecting forest lands.
The vote in Feb., 2008 by CalPERS Board of Trustees creates sustainable management standards for its Forestlands Investment policy, part of a new inflation-linked assets class. The new standards require timber managers to use ecologically sustainable logging practices in order to foster long-term and steady growth of both forest and financial returns.
The move by CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, continues California’s precedent-setting leadership role in fighting global warming and comes at a time when the economic benefits of forests are expanding as the result of growing worldwide demand for protecting the environmental health of the planet.
Forestry experts at The Nature Conservancy point out that by requiring independent, third-party certification for its forest investments, CalPERS will gain access to increasing consumer markets favoring sustainable forest products and green building materials, and keep CalPERS ahead of new regulatory actions.
