Forestry

Confidence in timber investment funds has been heightened after a major American state pension fund decided to put $500 million into timber.

Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board (Mass PRIM) has decided to make the investment just three years after selling a $700 million section of its timber portfolio.

Senior timber investment officer at Mass PRIM, Tim Schlitzer, said it was a perfect time to reinvest in the long-term benefits that timber can provide.

Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev is heading up the groundbreaking TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report and doing for nature what Sir Nicholas Stern did for climate change - valuing it

Tom Levitt: Why are we putting a value on nature, why don't we just close off and protect it?

In the days after the immensity of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico became clear, some Nature Conservancy supporters took to the organization's Web site to vent their anger.

AFP - Illegal logging and unregulated real estate projects are threatening the Balkans' once abundant forests, home to more than half of Europe's bears and to large wolf populations.