Precious Woods says “holistic sustainability” is the key to its success. That goes beyond supplying customers worldwide with certified sustainable timber from its forest and mill operations in Brazil and Gabon. It involves maximising the social and economic benefits of its businesses for local communities and improving their wider environmental impacts.
This commitment, says the company, has been further underlined by latest moves at its Brazilian forest and timber arm – Precious Woods Amazon.
The business owns and manages 506,699ha of forest in Itacoatiara, about 250km from Manaus. It was an FSC pioneer, with its forest estate certified in 1997. PEFC certification followed in 2017.
A key focus is on developing markets for lesser-known or secondary species to secure the greatest sustainable yield from the forest. Today its Itacoatiara mill, which has annual throughput of 164,400m3, supplies 37 different varieties, mainly selling to Europe and Asia. It offers air-dried and kiln-dried sawn timber, plus planed and profiled products.
“The UK is conservative when it comes to using lesser-known tropical timber species, but we do supply customers with a variety, including angelim vermelho, piquia, angelim pedra, cupiuba, araracanga, muiracatiara and angelim do campo,” said Markus Pfannkuch, Precious Woods’ chief sustainability officer. “As well as supplying importers direct, our timber also goes to UK buyers via Belgian and Netherlands businesses.”
Highlighting its focus on its wider environmental impacts, the Brazilian operation last year achieved FSC Ecosystem Services Certification for carbon sequestration and storage, recognising maintenance of its forest holding as a carbon sink.
“Now we have additionally received FSC Ecosystem Services Certification for Watershed Services,” said Mr Pfannkuch. “This highlights the positive impact of our sustainable forest management on water systems.”
The issue now, he added, is how to secure compensation for such efforts.
“But, while we still lack markets to valorise positive impacts of ecosystem services other than carbon, we do perceive customers becoming more sensitive to their importance,” he said.
For around 15 years, Precious Woods Amazon has also held a 40% stake in a biomass power plant, fuelled with by-product from its forest and timber operations. This year it acquired 100%.
The 9MW facility produces 45,000kWh of electricity annually. Of this, 25% is used for powering the mill and 75% fed into the grid to supply Itacoatiara, a town of over 100,000 people. To date it has been heavily dependent on generators for power and it’s estimated electricity from the Precious Woods plant will cut its annual diesel consumption by 10 million litres.
“Additionally, it generates Precious Woods 30-40,000 ‘Gold Standard’ carbon credits a year,” said Mr Pfannkuch.
Broadening its environmental perspective further, Precious Woods has initiated the ‘Communities Timber Pact’. The goal is to link tropical community forest projects with certified timber businesses and urban authorities globally to drive use of timber from sustainable tropical forestry.
Community forest operations, explains Precious Woods’ chief commercial officer Stéphane Glannaz, have a major influence on rainforest conservation and are “the guardians of the world’s biggest carbon sinks”. However, they struggle commercially.
“The Communities Timber Pact proposes development of a collective action plan between the public and private sector and NGOs to support these communities which contribute to rainforest protection,” said Mr Glannaz.
“It will connect responsible cities to them through purchase of certified timber products. It will also capitalise on the experience of certified timber operators and their structure and networks to establish training programmes to increase uptake of sustainable forest management practices and develop skills in the communities so they can deliver marketable timber products.”
The Pact’s roadmap for 2022 includes developing urban furniture made from forest communities’ timber, in association with architects and designers, and featuring the end products in a city furniture catalogue.
Precious Woods currently works with community forest operations in Guatemala belonging to the FORESCOM association. It supplied some of their timber for creation of the Partner Forest Walk in Glasgow for COP26. This was constructed by the Cities4Forests organisation to underline the value of urban wood use in supporting certified forestry and timber production and to highlight their role in climate change mitigation.
