Report Studies Growing Trees for Profit
Governments around the world have promised billions of dollars to replant trees on millions of hectares of poor land.
What is missing are the businesses to make this happen.
A new report by the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says it wants to solve this problem. The non-profit environmental organizations want to show that it is possible to make a profit from restoring deforested land.
Experts say that demands on land and effects of climate mean the world needs every hectare possible to produce food, clean the air and water.
Forests also are important for easing the effects of greenhouse gasses blamed for warming the earth’s atmosphere.
Sofia Faruqi is the lead author of the report. She said governments and non-government organizations cannot do everything. They also need investment from private businesses.
Brinkman Group is a tree-planting business based in Canada. The Brinkman Group website says it has planted 1.4 billion trees on 1 million hectares of land.
Dirk Brinkman, the company founder, believes that healthy forests make healthy economies. It's a simple idea, as he says, and “our future depends on it”.
Other companies included in the report are lowering the cost of restoration. BioCarbon Engineering, for example, flies drones that plant trees.
Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics professor at Yale, says that the idea of making money from planting trees is still very new. He said there is not a lot of information about the possible risks and returns.
