Climate

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE?

Climate change threatens to affect everything from how we do business to the well-being of our team and communities to the health of ecosystems around the planet. As global temperatures climb, changes in surface temperature and precipitation trends are leading to increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, wildfires and a loss of biodiversity. Sea-level rise, rising ocean temperatures and changes to standard growing conditions present challenges to our coastal communities and forests around the world. Risks to society, including threats to food security, water supply and economic growth, are also increasingly likely and severe.

To avoid the worst projected impacts, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stressed the need to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. All pathways to limit warming rely on rapid and dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with the transition to low- or zero-carbon energy sources and materials and the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere to counterbalance residual emissions.

WHAT IS OUR ROLE?

As the steward of millions of acres of sustainably managed forests in the United States and Canada, and one of the largest producers of wood products in the world, we are uniquely positioned to be part of the solution to the global challenge of climate change — and to help address the risks this crisis poses to our people, our operations and the communities where we live and work.

Our role in addressing climate change is multifaceted, starting with reducing our CO₂ emissions and producing low-carbon materials and energy sources. But our most significant contribution comes through providing immediate and long-term solutions to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. All the trees in our millions of acres of forests naturally sequester CO₂ as they grow and store it as solid carbon. Every wood product we produce, or that our customers make from our logs, stores much of that carbon for the life of the homes and buildings those finished products are used to build. After harvest, we replant new trees (or in some situations, we make sure the forest is regenerated naturally) to begin the cycle again. Every year, our growing landscape of trees removes more carbon than is released through harvesting. It’s part of a continuous and ever-increasing equation of carbon sequestration and storage on the landscape and in our products, and it makes working forests powerful, far-reaching and cost-effective tools for limiting the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

As one of the world’s largest private forest landowners, we recognize our responsibility to manage our forests in the face of climate change, and we work to ensure they stay healthy and productive and continue to act as a natural climate solution. We also know that climate change is projected to more severely affect communities that are already vulnerable, and we are committed to leveraging our sustainable working forests and our influence as a company to deliver climate-smart solutions that benefit everyone.

WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE BY 2030?

By 2030, we envision a world where the value of working forests and the products that come from them are fully recognized as one of the key solutions for slowing and reducing the impacts of climate change. Through our research, stewardship and industry leadership, we endeavor to be a model for how working forests can and should be part of a sustainable, biodiverse and climate-resilient solution — today and long into the future.

WHERE WE ARE FOCUSED FOR PHASE 2 (2023-2025)?

While there is much we can accomplish over a decade, we have structured our long-term goals into three-year phases to effectively prioritize and accelerate progress. Currently, we are two-thirds of the way through the second phase of our 3 by 30 Climate Sustainability Ambition — running from 2023 to 2025 — and are focusing our work in two key areas:

PHASE 2 ACCOMPLISHMENTS

During the second phase of our 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions, we are intentionally making fewer, but more strategic, investments of our time and resources. While much of our Phase 2 work is ongoing, we have already achieved several important milestones.

• We monetized our first forest carbon project in Maine, registered a project in Mississippi and laid out our Carbon Credit Principles describing the foundational beliefs and approaches that guide our participation in the carbon market.
• We published our GHG Inventory Principles to demonstrate our leadership in carbon integrity and to advocate for our preferred approach to forest carbon accounting, which draws on years spent building our own GHG inventory, implementing best practices and incorporating input from nonprofits and scientific advisors.
• We expanded other areas of our Natural Climate Solutions business through the development of renewable energy projects and mitigation banks and new agreements for carbon capture and sequestration.
• We developed climate-focused partnerships with leading environmental nonprofits, including a multiyear collaboration with The Nature Conservancy focused on advancing natural climate solutions science, carbon methodologies and climate-smart forestry.
• We supported academic research into climate-resilient forestry by partnering with North Carolina State University to study the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal forests, and with the University of Georgia’s Southern Pine Health Research Cooperative to explore real-time monitoring of insects using automated sensors.
• We catalyzed the development of a new forest and wood carbon data platform from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Endowment for Communities and Forestry to help the entire sector tell a more credible and coherent story about the carbon impact of forests and wood products.
• We developed our Scope 1 and 2 net-zero transition plan and refreshed our Scope 3 GHG emissions inventory and continued to make progress toward our 2030 emission-reduction targets.
• We engaged climate and sustainability stakeholders at the national and international levels through our participation at Climate Week NYC, COP28 and other key industry events to build trust in the voluntary carbon market.

FOUNDATIONAL SUCCESSES FROM PHASE 1 (2020 – 2022)

In the first phase of our work to achieve our 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions, we laid the groundwork for meaningful progress toward our goals. We accomplished over 90 percent of the action items we set out to achieve with remaining actions rolled into Phase 2.