Forestbase

At Forestbase, we are on a mission to protect all primary rainforests globally. Deforestation is a land use crisis driven by financial incentive. Nature is inherently connected to land. There is a price on land everywhere. That means that nature is present in the financial system, but only with one leg. Forests are being sold for their value in land, with the pristine nature on top valued at zero. This means that the price tag on nature is way too low. We have the ambition to show the world the true financial value of nature. We acquire primary forests, always bigger than 10 000 hectares, we protect them and bring them to market as natural infrastructure assets in a stabilized legal-financial format. By unlocking financial market dynamics, we believe we can reach a much higher price point for forests than we see today. Our financial models, commissioned externally, show that this price point can go beyond €10 000/ha, which is in strong contrast with today’s €25/ha.

- We enable investors to invest directly in primary forests as an infrastructure asset. - We finance entire projects as part of the forest we acquire from the private market. We try to acquire high-risk forests on which timber and agro enterprises can make a bid. - Our focus is on conservation of entire ecosystems, which is why we always acquire forests >10 000 hectares. - Our projects will be tracked with technology (drone flights, satellite imagery, bodycams and acoustic devices). But we will also track the socio-economic evolution in the surroundings of the forests that we acquire since we consider the wellbeing of communities a key conservation asset. - We request our partners to confirm that we are only having conversations in a context of respect towards the mitigation ladder and that they only offset what they cannot reasonable solve internally. - We work at the hearth of deforestation, and we consider pristine forests as planetary infrastructure. By doing so, the effect of what we do has positive impact on all 38 ecosystem services (carbon, biodiversity, water, pollination, erosion, soil quality...). - By increasing the value of primary forests, we reduce the global available hectares for agro land, since many parties will start considering the conservation case as better than agro when we reach a tipping point. By doing so, the remaining agro land will be incentivized to yield more efficiently. - By setting a more precise standard, we want to make the term ‘Natural Capital’ stricter in use.