New Forests has partnered with Oji Holdings to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund, a corporate forest investment fund aimed at advancing Oji’s 2030 environmental targets. The partnership includes a significant investment of nearly US$300 million from Oji Holdings, alongside a co-investment from New Forests.
The fund will focus on acquiring productive plantation forestry assets across Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America, and Africa, ensuring both financial returns and climate benefits. Oji aims to achieve an additional 1.5 million tCO2e per year in net carbon sequestration from these forestry assets by 2030.
Oji Holdings is already a significant investor in plantation forests globally with 635,000 hectares and through this partnership, seeks to invest in an additional 70,000 hectares 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.
Mark Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of New Forests said, “We are excited to partner with Oji, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pulp and paper, to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund as a new initiative that leverages our 20 years of experience managing forest investment funds.
We are continuing to see momentum and interest from corporates looking to invest in forestry and the natural capital asset class. By investing in sustainable forest plantations in four major regions of the world, we will be assisting Oji to achieve their 2030 mission of growing their sustainable forestry assets and reducing overall carbon emissions.”
Oji commented, “Through the operation of this fund, we will combine the diverse expertise of New Forests, an expert in forest management, with our own forest management technologies. We aim to develop products that use wood resources and contribute to the realisation of a sustainable society.”
The Future Forest Innovations Fund has been established as an open-ended, Variable Capital Company (VCC) registered in Singapore.