NEWS RELEASES

Vancouver, BC — The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) announced the recipient of the 2023 SFI Leadership in Conservation Award at the 2023 SFI Annual Conference in collaboration with PEFC Week today. Mosaic Forest Management (Mosaic), with operations in Coastal British Columbia, is being recognized for its early and enthusiastic adoption of SFI’s climate smart forestry objective.
Mosaic’s scientifically calculated target is to be net-zero by 2035 across all operations and to become a positive sequestration business. To achieve this, the organization actively considers climate change in operations management and forest planning, seeking to mitigate the risk by reducing emissions, enhancing silviculture, and increasing forest carbon sequestration. Mosaic has several progressive initiatives and programs to accomplish climate smart forestry.

“Forests across the globe play a prominent role in mitigating the effects of climate change. Mosaic’s leadership in adopting progressive climate smart forestry practices that align with SFI certification is demonstrating the tremendous potential of forests in helping to address one of the greatest challenges we face,” said Lauren Cooper, Chief Conservation Officer of SFI.

The organization has created the BigCoast Forest Climate Initiative, which defers harvesting of 40,000 hectares of private land in Coastal British Columbia for 25 years or longer. The initiative reduces greenhouse gas emissions by more than 20 million tonnes over its lifetime. A portion of the revenue will support the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas Innovation Program and the Pacific Salmon Foundation to enable cultural and scientific research on and around the project lands. Mosaic also plants two trees for every tree harvested—they estimate that across their private and tenured lands in B.C., more than 650 million trees are growing and sequestering carbon.

“Mosaic is honoured to receive this award from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. This award reaffirms that our BigCoast Forest Climate Initiative directly contributes to genuine net-zero goals and aligns to SFI’s climate smart forestry objective,” said Domenico Iannidinardo, Senior Vice President, Forest & Climate and Chief Forester at Mosaic. “The Initiative will capture 20M tonnes of CO2 and conserve some of B.C.’s important ecosystems, wildlife habitats, drinking watersheds, and lands with cultural significance to Coastal First Nations.”
Mosaic is also a leader in carbon tracking, developing an inventory tool to annually assess their entire carbon footprint. They are also developing ways to forecast future climate conditions with modeling, for example, by using weather station snow sensors, which will add precision to operations and shape decisions about when and where to operate.

“SFI Certification has always been a critical component of our commitment to sustainable forest management,” said Molly Hudson, Director of Sustainability at Mosaic. “Mosaic was the first company in Canada to obtain SFI certification of all our forest lands in 2000, and we will use the additional momentum from this award to redouble our work to keep great forestry as part of the solution for a sustainable society”.

The new climate smart forestry objective, in the SFI Forest Management Standard, requires SFI-certified organizations to ensure that forest management activities address climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. The UN International Panel on Climate Change recently recognized the importance of forests in its Climate Change 2023 report and the new objective strives to align certified organizations with these science-based principals.

Lauren Cooper
Chief Conservation Officer
Sustainable Forestry Initiative