Sustainable Forestry: February 2008 Archives
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.
