New Forests partners with Oji Holdings to establish a forestry fund to help meet 2030 goals

SYDNEY:  26 March 2025 – New Forests has entered into a partnership with Oji Holdings to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund, a corporate forest investment fund to help it achieve its 2030 environmental goals. The partnership sees an almost US$300 million investment from Oji Holdings, along with a co-investment from New Forests.

Through the fund, Oji will seek to invest in productive plantation forestry assets in Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America and Africa, that both generate a financial return and provide considerable climate benefits. Oji will seek to target an additional 1.5m tCO₂e per annum of net sequestration by 2030 from the forestry assets it acquires.

Oji Holdings is already a significant investor in plantation forests globally with 635,000 hectares and through this partnership, seeks to invest in an additional 70,000 hectares of plantation forests, across greenfield and brownfield assets in the four main regions.

New Forests will draw upon its 20-year history managing forests sustainably for financial, environmental and community impacts, while focusing on an improvement in genetics, implementation of leading information and analytics systems, and advanced application of geo-spatial data across forestry assets.

Mark Rogers, Chief Executive Officer of New Forests said,
“We are excited to partner with Oji, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pulp and paper, to establish the Future Forest Innovations Fund as a new initiative that leverages our 20 years of experience managing forest investment funds.

We are continuing to see momentum and interest from corporates looking to invest in forestry and the natural capital asset class. By investing in sustainable forest plantations in four major regions of the world, we will be assisting Oji to achieve their 2030 mission of growing their sustainable forestry assets and reducing overall carbon emissions.”

Oji commented, “Through the operation of this fund, we will combine the diverse expertise of New Forests, an expert in forest management, with our own forest management technologies. We aim to develop products that use wood resources and contribute to the realisation of a sustainable society.”

The Future Forest Innovations Fund has been established as an open-ended, Variable Capital Company (VCC) registered in Singapore.

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