Forestland investment has surged in the past few decades as a result of land ownership change in the forestry industry. Timberland investment and management organizations and real estate investment trusts have bought up land and resources that were divested by vertically integrated forest products companies. This book provides a seminal coverage of this seismic shift in the industry, exploring the philosophy, driving factors, valuation, theory, research, implementation, practice, and effects of forestland investment. Across 15 chapters the book reviews the history of forestland investment; discusses the optimal forest rotation; explains timberland appraisal; examines the return drivers of forestland; analyzes timberland index construction methods and results; prices timberland assets; reviews financial and real options; investigates real option values in forestland management; evaluates timber harvest contracts; examines new opportunities in the emerging woody bioenergy market; and eventually offers prospects on forestland investment in the future. It also discusses how forest carbon can be used as a nature-based climate solution. This book is essential reading for forestry business students and scholars, as well as practitioners and policymakers in the industry.

"This review looks at the Nation's legal, institutional, and economic capacity to promote forest conservation and sustainable resource management. It focuses on 20 indicators of Criterion Seven of the so-called Montreal Process and involves an extensive search and synthesis of information from a variety of sources. It identifies ways to fill information gaps and improve the usefulness of several indicators. It concludes that there is substantial information about the application of such capacities, although that application is widely dispersed among agencies and private interests; which in turn has led to differing interpretations of the indicators. Individual chapters identify a need to further develop the conceptual foundation on which many of the indicators are predicated. While many uncertainties in the type and accuracy of information are brought to light, the review clearly indicates that legal, institutional, and economic capacities to promote sustainability are large and widely available in both the public and private sectors."--P. vi.

In the past 100-plus years, forestland ownerships have gone through two structural changes in the US and other parts of the world: the accumulation of industrial timberlands between 1900s and 1980s and the transformation of industrial timberlands to institutional ownerships afterwards. This book is about the history and economics of these two structural changes with the emphasis on the latter. The scale of both changes is unprecedented and truly revolutionary, impacting tens of millions of acres of private landholdings and billions of dollars of investment and affecting industrial structure, forest management and policy, research and development, community welfare, and forest sustainability. Looking though a historical count of key events, players, prevailing management philosophies, public policy, and institutional factors, the author of this book searches for an economic explanation and assesses the impact of these two changes. Its main contributions are three folds. First, it explains why industrial firms were able to profit from owning large areas of forest lands in the first place and how institutional investors could purchase these lands later. Many details of the history that could have otherwise been lost are revealed in this book for the first time. Second, it compares private and public equity timberland investments with respect to risk-adjusted returns as well as such other dimensions of interest to investors and forest managers including alignment of interests, capacity to exploit market inefficiencies, and their forest management and conservation records. Finally, it provides thoughtful commentary into the future of institutional timberland investments and global forest sustainability. This book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the workings of the modern forest sector in the U.S. and elsewhere, forest investment, and forest sustainability.