It is important to Tornator’s owners, such as Finnish employment pension companies, that the company manages its forest over generations, ensuring the long-term sustainability of its operations. To Tornator, ensuring biodiversity has always been part of our normal, everyday work. However, with climate change, the topic is under greater scrutiny. We got a feeling that our society needs a positive example how an individual actor can set concrete, measurable targets for ensuring biodiversity and thereby create faith for a better tomorrow. As Finland’s largest private forest owner,Tornator decided to raise the bar even higher and challenge not only itself but also others to take concrete action to ensure biodiversity.
The subject is very acute: the diversity of many biotopes and species is under threat. Public debate has raised the need to value natural capital much more than previously. We have also seen how climate change and loss of natural habitat create a vicious circle. Expects have stated that to fight climate change, we have to reduce the use of fossil raw materials radically, finding alternatives that are renewable, environmentally friendly and sustainable in terms of biodiversity. Renewable wood raw material from sustainably managed forests is a good solution, but not without its problems. Forest use may have negative effects on biodiversity. This is why we should not settle for the minimum requirements, thinking that the current methods are sufficient. We are at a crossroads with our planet, and the world needs models and forerunners.
From the viewpoint of an individual company, maintaining financial profitability is obviously critical in the long term. In terms of biodiversity, it is also important that forest companies are profitable. A profitable company has resources to train its staff to identify factors that ensure biodiversity in their forests, and to invest in digital systems to facilitate the detection and registration of valuable natural sites. A financially profitable company can also take care of its social and ecological responsibilities. Overall sustainability is a company’s primary duty, and in the long term profitability is a prerequisite for the company’s positive ecological impact, including biodiversity.
Does the new Biodiversity Program and investments in it somehow make Tornator less profitable? This is easy to answer: Tornator’s business plan is for a century. If we do not ensure continued biodiversity, we jeopardise our entire business plan, and that would be very costly to our owners. Sustainability and profitability go hand in hand, at least in our business.
Fighting against the loss of biodiversity and climate change are issues by which our children and grandchildren will judge us. Let’s not disappoint them.
Tornator Plc
Henrik Nieminen, CEO
