New Forests Partners With Oji Holdings to Establish $300 Million Forestry Fund

On Wednesday, New Forests announced that it has entered into a partnership with Oji Holdings to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund, a corporate forest investment fund to help it achieve its 2030 environmental goals. The partnership sees an almost US$300 million investment from Oji Holdings, along with a co-investment from New Forests.

Through the fund, Oji will seek to invest in productive plantation forestry assets in Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America and Africa, that both generate a financial return and provide considerable climate benefits. Oji will seek to target an additional 1.5m tCO₂e per annum of net sequestration by 2030 from the forestry assets it acquires.

Oji Holdings is already a significant investor in plantation forests globally with 635,000 hectares (1.57 million acres) and through this partnership, seeks to invest in an additional 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) of plantation forests, across greenfield and brownfield assets in the four main regions.

New Forests will draw upon its 20-year history managing forests sustainably for financial, environmental, and community impacts, while focusing on an improvement in genetics, implementation of leading information and analytics systems, and advanced application of geo-spatial data across forestry assets.

The Future Forest Innovations Fund has been established as an open-ended, Variable Capital Company (VCC) registered in Singapore.