The Business of Sustainable Forestry - Case Studies: Analyses And Case Studies

Book Description

Book Description

Book Description

The Menominee Tribe has lived in northeast Wisconsin and on Michigan's Upper Peninsula for generations, where ancestral tribal lands once encompassed more than 10 million acres. Following several treaties and land cessions, the Menominee people established a Reservation in 1854 totaling 235,000 acres of predominantly timber land. Since then, the backbone to the economy of the Menominee Nation has been its forests and the industry surrounding the sustainable management of that resource.

The Menominee Tribal Enterprises (MTE) has been an engine of the Menominee economy over the last 140 years and, within the last 30 years, has pioneered the implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) throughout the Menominee Forest.

Today, the Menominees remain the only Native American tribe to have their forestlands independently certified as being sustainably managed. They are also the only forestlands operation in the United States and Canada that holds dual environmental certification from both the Forest Stewardship Council-approved SmartWood and Scientific Certification Systems (SCS).

The concepts of sustainability in forest ecosystems and surrounding the communities that the Menominee have practiced for so many years include three components of a sustainable forest system:

The forest must be sustainable for future generations.
The forest must be cared for properly to provide for the many varying needs of people over time.
All the pieces of the forest must be maintained for diversity.

Looking closely at what MTE has accomplished in SFM and product development during the last twenty-five years provides unique insight into the economic opportunities and constraints that face other forest products operations considering SFM practices. With a twenty-five-year track record, MTE is one of the few examples in the world where realized forest management performance over time can be compared with intended results to determine whether SFM actually does what it is purported to do:

Increase the quality and volume of wood grown in a forest system over time.
Provide more consistent and stable annual harvested timber volumes while maintaining or improving forest ecosystems.
Maintain or improve a forest ecosystem health that recognizes the value of multiple uses of a forest.
Sustain communities that surround the forest through job generation and the creation of educational opportunities.
Increase the value per unit of wood products produced from SFM forest resources through documented performance in the marketplace.

Book Description

The discussion of the certification of forest systems has, until recently, revolved largely around the forests and those landowners who elect to invest in certification. However, the response of wood products manufacturers to certification efforts and their willingness to work with certified wood is as important to the acceptance of certification as timber producers' willingness to adopt it. If certification is, as many argue, incentive-based and market-driven, then a system must be in place beyond the forest that tracks certified wood flow through to finished products for consumers. Between the forest and the consumer stands the wood product manufacturer. Wood product manufacturers have their own set of criteria for deciding if and when to invest in certification. Some argue that in the present environment investment in certification is premature, since many questions about its economic viability and performance remain unanswered. They ask, for instance:

Is there documented demand of sufficient size for certified wood products in the marketplace to warrant manufacturers to change their traditional business practices?
Can a wood product manufacturer capture a premium off the sale of certified wood products?
Is there added market and business advantage to offering certified wood products that is demonstrated in either increased product market share and/or increased company visibility?
Can a manufacturer be cost competitive in product development if required to separate certified and noncertified wood supply and finished product at the production facility?
Can certified wood production make a positive difference to the business bottom line?

Book Description

As experience grows with sustainable forest management (SFM) practices throughout the world, one single factor continues to emerge as noncontrovertible: SFM practices do appear to cost more to implement in the forest. It is this factor that continues to drive the debate over whether SFM practices are economically-feasible for the forest products industry. If SFM proponents fail to recognize the importance of helping industry to increase the higher value of wood produced with equal or less resource use, then incentive-based efforts to infuse SFM practices and certified wood product development into accepted industry standards will not succeed. Finding ways to foster the adoption of emerging technologies that enable the forest industry to accomplish better bottom-line results could prove to be of significant benefit to fast-tracking the implementation of SFM practices worldwide. Identifying these emerging technologies, however, and providing a pathway for easier entry into the market is no simple task.

Book Description

The forest products industry ranks as one of the world's most important industries ;for the global economy and the environment. It represents close to 3% of the world's gross economic output. The forests upon which it depends are among the most critical ecosystems for the health of the planet and for human well-being. The size of the industry, its links to the rest of the world economy, and the importance of its resource base for environmental services make it the target of intense public scrutiny and government regulation. Understanding sustainable forestry requires understanding the evolving dynamics of the forest products industry an evolution that is increasingly making the cost of wood a smaller fraction of the final value of a forest product.

Two frameworks are used here as prisms through which to view the industry. The first section describes how the major business and environmental trends sweeping the industry are transforming Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) into a major industry force. It then outlines the most critical nonenvironmental drivers that make or break all businesses within the industry, and explains how they will influence sustainability issues. The second section describes how all these forces play out within each of the three major industry segments: paper, solid wood, and engineered wood products, and maps out in which parts of the industry sustainable forestry is already a major issue, where it is not, and why.

This approach makes sense given the history of SFM. Most sustainable forestry businesses have started from the forest, then tried to move forward to the market. An analysis that assesses the industry and links market conditions back to sustainable forestry supply capabilities reveals where sustainable forestry is well integrated, where it may not have much current opportunity, and where opportunity for closer end-market integration remains untapped.

The forces transforming the industry include: tightening supplies, a shift in production regions, globalization, increased raw material efficiency, intensified product consistency, and heightened government regulation. Just as these forces are affected by environmental pressures, they also have environmental impacts of their own.

As population growth and burgeoning economies spur the consumption of forest products, wood supplies are tightening worldwide. While no crisis is imminent, the industry is turning to new regions, especially South America and South Asia, as a source for wood. It is also gradually shifting from a supply based largely on natural forests to one that depends on plantations, many located in the southern hemisphere. Just when environmental restrictions are curtailing wood production in many northern countries, heightened demand elsewhere is causing the industry to expand into delicate ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the industry is becoming increasingly globalized, with raw materials sourced throughout the world to create products for equally diverse markets.

Shifts in producing regions and globalization are creating new opportunities for value-added industries in the southern hemisphere. Primary and secondary processing industries will follow wood supplies for financial reasons, as timber producing nations try to capture a larger share of the production from forest products. These changes will draw significant investment to the Southern Hemisphere.

Globalization brings improvements in communications, shipping, and distribution that facilitate the transfer of knowledge about state-of-the-art forest management techniques. These same developments make the emergence of an international trade in certified forest products possible. As capital travels to formerly untapped forest reserves, for example those in eastern Russia, the forces unleashed by globalization will exert even greater pressures on forests worldwide in the next twenty years.

Evermore efficient raw material use and increasing product standardization are also contributing to the industry's transformation. Over the past several decades, the industry has created many technological silver bullets that enable it to create more product from less wood.

The industry-wide drive for standardization and consistency is moving down the value chain from final consumer products through to the forest. Instead of emphasizing efforts to use individual species such as oak and cherry, resources are now allocated to figure out how to make a vanilla feedstock such as rubber wood look and perform like oak or cherry. Eventually, this trend will lead to more investment in processing assets that can guarantee consistency, and a movement toward either tree plantations or homogenization during primary and secondary processing.

Environmental forces have flexed their political and market muscles, placing the forest products industry under intensifying public scrutiny and government regulation of its environmental performance. New regulations and market initiatives are curtailing access to government controlled forest resources, and influencing the management of private forests. While a number of international agreements designed to improve forest practices might eventually affect the industry, few now have the teeth to do so.

In the past five years "certification" has emerged as a nongovernmental initiative that may further transform the way the industry manages its forests. Certified forest products are defining the market for wood products grown in an environmentally sound fashion. While the full impact of certification is still unknown, if it focuses the concerns of consumers and purchasers on the quality of the forest from which a product is harvested, and if certification is widely adopted, it could dramatically improve forest management and change markets.

How the business and environmental forces affect the paper, panels, and sawnwood segments of the industry will determine, in large measure, the future of sustainable forest products. The paper industry, with its massive capital investments, huge pollution abatement costs, extreme business cycles, and susceptibility to buyer power, has long been beleaguered. The paper industry's recent shift to greater use of recycled paper demonstrates both its vulnerability to outside pressures and its ability to adapt rapidly to a new business environment.

Panels and engineered wood products may be a model for the future. Products in this segment, capitalizing on rapid-fire technological advances, are among the fastest growing in the industry. From an environmental perspective, these products' ability to use a variety of woods now makes them more attractive than plywood, the once dominant panel product. On the other hand, certified panel products will be much tougher to bring to market because it is so difficult to ensure that all the woods used in them come from sustainably managed forests.

Sawnwood products draw most of the attention from the certification community. The sawnwood segment is more fragmented, less capital intensive and adds relatively less value to its products than paper or panels. Sawnwood companies in temperate regions that produce hardwood will have opportunities to sell to markets opened up by a new resistance to tropical hardwoods. The forest management practices of softwood producers, however, are under heavy scrutiny, and they will find fewer opportunities to leverage superior forest management. Although tropical countries are under enormous international pressure to improve their forest management practices, most of the internal and Pacific Rim markets they serve, so far, remain relatively uninterested in the environmental qualities of forest products. Niche opportunities, though, are available in Europe to tropical producers that can produce certified forest products.

Book Description

Most forest products analysts exploring the market for sustainable forest products have been searching for the green consumer. They have assumed that the well-documented consumer concerns about the impact of the industry on the forest would make consumer demand the dominant force propelling the industry toward sustainability.

While consumers' concerns about the industry's environmental impact remain important, many other, more powerful, forces are at work that will lead to an overall market shift towards sustainable forest management (SFM). These factors are converging to shift environmental attention on the industry from process controls and recycling to the management of forest resources. Today, a greater emphasis on the entire life cycle of forest products is pushing environmental concerns through the value chain from retail stores and pulp mills back down to the forest floor.

This paper assesses the major drivers and pressures on the forest products industry that are combining to bring about more SFM; thereby, significantly increasing the volume of sustainably produced forest products entering the markets.

Book Description

When business leaders, government officials, and other stakeholders come to the table in an environmental, health, or safety dispute, acrimony often results, leading to expensive and time-consuming litigation. Not only does this waste precious resources, but rarely does the process produce the best outcome for any of the parties involved.

For the past five years, the authors of this volume have conducted semi-annual seminars at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard to provide business leaders and regulators with the knowledge and skills they need to more effectively handle environmental, health, and safety negotiations. Their strategy, known as the "mutual gains approach," is a proven method of producing fairer, more efficient, more stable, and wiser results. Negotiating Environmental, Health, and Safety Agreements provides the first comprehensive introduction to this widely practiced and highly effective approach to environmental regulation.

The book begins with an overview of the mutual gains approach, introducing important concepts and ideas from negotiation theory as well as the theory and practice of mediation. The authors then offer five model negotiations from their MIT-Harvard Public Disputes seminar, followed by a series of real-world negotiated environmental agreements that illustrate the kinds of outcomes possible when the mutual gains approach is employed. A collection of writings by leading experts provide valuable insights into the process, and appendixes offer both instructions for conducting model negotiation sessions and analysis of actual game results from earlier seminars.

This is the only prescriptive text available for the many regulatees and regulators involved in environmental regulatory negotiations each year. Anyone involved with environmental negotiation-including corporate and public sector managers, students of environmental policy, environmental management, and business management-will find the book an essential resource.

Product Description

Jan Wilhelm, Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht, aims both at law students and at lawyers and other practitioners concerned with the law of corporations. After giving a general introduction, the book presents the main "classic" problems which have arisen in case law and are discussed in academic writing. Jan Wilhelm particularly focuses on the development in case law since the courts' influence on company law is vital.

Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (RWS-Grundkurs)

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Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (RWS-Grundkurs)
Heribert Hirte
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Übungen im Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht mit Bezügen zum Kapitalmarktrecht (Jura Ubungen/Juristische Ausbildung)

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Übungen im Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht mit Bezügen zum Kapitalmarktrecht (Jura Ubungen/Juristische Ausbildung)
Markus Brauer
Manufacturer: Walter de Gruyter
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ASIN: 3899492447

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The casebook from Brauer hands the advanced students, who deal with Corporation Law and Capital Market Law, an applied article of the "classical problem" of these fields of law at exam level. Particular attention is given to an as representative as possible exam-type processing of the problem.

Das belgische Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (Auslandische Aktiengesetze)

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Das belgische Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (Auslandische Aktiengesetze)

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Wechselseitige Beteiligungen im deutschen Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (Rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung und Entwicklung)

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Wechselseitige Beteiligungen im deutschen Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht (Rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung und Entwicklung)
Alfred Frank
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ASIN: 3882596252

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