Citola Blog
Forests, Financials And The Future
Gloom or boom? There’s no shortage of media reports of this fragile world of ours teetering on the brink of collapse. And a story being a story, there are plenty of positive opinions out there too.
So here are a couple of snippets from either end of the spectrum, followed by a steer towards someone who seemed to see it all coming – and in a proper business context.
Let’s start with the gloom. Basically, we’re running out of trees and oxygen, and we’re all going to suffocate soon because of our own greedy consumerism. That’s the hyperbolic undertow of this report. Fortunately, there’s something we can do other than lying awake at night and worrying. And that’s to create a sustainable, commercially sensible timber offering. Which is just what we’ve done here at Citola. We may not save the world on our own, but we can make very hard-headed business sense of what we do as well as having a positive impact on the environment.
The positive news comes from a long-awaited accounting development. In essence, the carbon-accounting protocols now being adopted allow the men in suits to quantify the positive outcomes of reforestation and avoided deforestation projects. Good reason to paint the town REDD.
This really ought not to be news. In a book we read some 15 years ago, one author pointed out that for money and ecological accounting to coincide happily, the Californian code of green accounting should be widely adopted. The book in question occupied the same space as Freakonomics, but got there several yeas beforehand. The chapter on ethical investment is funny, accurate, and ahead of its time.
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