Forests for People

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Investing in sustainable timberland:

returns, environmental and social benefits,

bioenergy and forest fuel

Reinhold Glauner, WaKa - Forest Investment Services AG, Winterthur, Switzerland

orests have always provided and will continue to

provide a major livelihood for people. Their environ-

mental services and their function for providing goods

are undisputed. However, beyond direct benefits, for example

the provision of food, shelter and firewood and the economic

functions of forests at local or global scale, opinions often

strongly divert.

Textbooks addressing the question ‘What is the economic value of a

forest?’ could fill bookshelves. Values have been assigned for envi-

ronmental services such as recreation, erosion protection, carbon

stocks and sequestration and biodiversity. Even birds and individ-

ual trees have been assigned values. However, forest owners could

rarely ever achieve these values in monetary terms.

More tangible figures exists when it comes to land and

timber values. Again, forestry experts are not in total

agreement but volatility is much smaller and docu-

mented through concrete market deals when forests

change ownership.

The histories of humans and forests are strongly

interlinked and hunter-gatherers began to influence

forest development 50,000 years ago. The evolution of

agriculture some 10,000 years ago was a quantum leap

in the development of the human race, and influence on

forests was even stronger. One does not need to go far

back in time: The Middle Ages deforested Germany to

Forest investments create skilled labour (FSC-certified investment in natural

forests in Brazil)

Nurseries are the basis for carbon sequestration with forest

plantations creating jobs in rural areas (FSC-certified nursery for

Acacia mangium

in Brazil)

Image: R. Glauner