Live from HDOM

Our colleagues Angelica and Albrecht travelled all the way to Brazil for the HDOM Summit, one of the biggest forestry conferences in South America. Besides meeting interesting people from the forestry industry, there were many informative speeches about forestry investment and management.

Brazil has 9 million hectares of planted forests and a global situation that demands more and more timber. The HDOM discussed the rising price of some materials, such as herbicides, as well as the effects of drought due to climate change. All this reaffirms the need to focus on precision technologies, which quickly detect problem areas, optimise the use of resources and maximise yields at the end of the rotation time.

Brazilian forestry insights live from HDOM in São Paulo this week. Here’s a provocative thought: demand and prices for land have increased steeply in the past years, driven by prices for meat and Ag commodities. So commercial forest plantations have been cut and replaced by cattle farming.

Does converting grazingland to plantation, or even just continuing plantation instead of cattle farming, fulfill the additionality criteria for forestry carbon projects?

What are your thoughts on this?