Both the forest industry and conservation interests operate in a constantly changing forest investment climate. R&A offers balanced, strategic expertise in evolving situations and a well-founded understanding of current trends and probable future developments.

Changes in Conservation
Until recently, formal conservation efforts have most often focused on the preservation of specific local geographies, “gems” of biodiversity and relatively small areas of habitat for endangered animals and plants. Such transactions have generally occurred at small scale as spin-offs of larger transactions. Now that timberland ownership must be considered at an institutional scale – transactions of multiple hundreds of thousands of acres – conservation must turn to investing at a landscape level. The traditional strategy lacks sufficient scale. Conservation interests have begun to think and act more like financial investors and to partner with them as financial participants, acquiring “working forest easements” as well as specific local geographies.

The papers in the links below describe the structure and economics of partnerships between Conservation and financial investors, resulting in transaction efficiencies for both.

Forest Conservation Partnership

Conservation Partnership Economics
(These PDF files require the Free Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Conservation Partnership Economics Spreadsheet
(This file requires Microsoft Excel)

Changes in the Forest Industry
Since 1990, legislation throughout the U.S. has imposed forest practice regulations on an industry traditionally accustomed to an unregulated operating environment. Prescriptive regulation has been most intense in the Pacific Northwest, but nowhere more than in California , where forest practices are more heavily regulated than anywhere in the world. It is notable that at the California Forest Futures Conference, in May, 2005, regulators, conservation interests, legislators, industry, and investors were for the first time of one voice: Prescriptive regulation is not working and, indeed, harms the environment by making forestry less competitive compared to more developed uses. Follow the link to a well-received talk that Mr. Rinehart delivered at that conference on this subject.

Ownership Change and Fragmentation:
A Presentation to the California Forest Futures Conference