In order to protect the land and its diverse habitats from development, the investment group of the Swedish retail giant IKEA has purchased forestland in southeast Georgia.
On January 14, the company reported that the Ingka Group, which owns and operates most Ikea stores, had acquired 10,840 acres of land near the Altamaha River Basin.
“We truly believe responsible forest management is possible and we see that a large part of our responsibility towards the land we own — and by extension the planet — is to restore forests and plant more than we harvest,” Ingka Investments managing director Krister Mattsson told CNN.
“In all our properties nature conservation is important. In this particular US investment in Georgia, first, it is important that the land cannot be broken up into small units and it remains forever forestland.”
The land, bought from the Conservation Fund, a non-profit conservation group, is home to over 350 species of plants and wildlife that are now protected, including endangered longleaf pines and gopher tortoises.
The longleaf pine forest occupied over 90 million acres from southern Virginia to Florida, and as far west as Texas, prior to European migration to North America. In Georgia, the tree dominated the southern half of the state.
But less than 4 percent of the forest remains, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, due to land clearing for construction and agriculture, fire suppression, and the conversion of tree farms to faster-growing pine trees like loblolly and slash.
There will continue to be funding for local timber-based economies, Mattsson said, and most of the property will be open to the public for recreational purposes.
“We are honored to work with Ingka Group and applaud its dedication to preserve and enhance forest quality in the U.S. and Europe,” The Conservation Fund president Larry Selzer said in a statement.
The Conservation Fund focuses on the purchase of working forests through its Working Forests Fund and on protecting them with licenses that keep the land from being broken up in future sales. It then resells the land once the easement is acquired and uses the proceeds to buy more forests for protection.
In the US, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania, Ingka Investments has purchased about 612,821 acres of forestland since 2014. The group owns forest lands in Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas, and Georgia.
Investing in forests is part of IKEA’s contribution to a positive climate. By 2030, the organization has announced its goal of eliminating more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire Ikea value chain emissions.
The Ingka Group currently runs 378 of the world’s 445 Ikea stores.
Source: CNN