Holiday greetings – Planting trees & New Environmental Initiatives

Since 2011, Nordic Business Forum has planted one tree per attendee of its annual flagship event in Finland as a way to at least partly compensate for its carbon emissions. This year we are continuing our tradition of planting trees, but we are doing things a bit differently this time.

This year we made a donation to a World Vision project. The project is aiming to restore 8000 hectares of forest in Ethiopia, out of which our donation will finance the reforestation of 195 hectares. This will result in approximately 487 500 new trees being planted.

World Vision’s Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) method helps empower communities who are suffering from the effects of degraded land and climate change.

In addition to planting new trees, the project is going to revive the roots of already existing vegetation, using FMNR. This method is a sustainable land restoration technique, which helps to increase resilience to climate change and living standards in the area.

In practice, FMNR involves training farmers to systematically regrow and manage trees and shrubs from seeds, sprouting root systems, and trees that have been cut. The regrown vegetation helps to restore soil structure and fertility, fight erosion, increase biodiversity, and rehabilitate water sources.

The new forest will grow quickly and sustainably. As a result, it can double crop yields, provide timber for building and firewood, shade for the livestock, and wild food for nutrition and medication.

Changing up our tree donation tradition is not the only thing we are doing differently this year. In 2022 we also decided to start a new initiative to protect the biodiversity of our forests here in Finland.

New initiative: Forest protection for biodiversity restoration

During the recent years, we have become more and more conscious about the threat of a massive global biodiversity catastrophe. We have decided to take action by starting a forest protection initiative to do our part in preserving and restoring biodiversity.

Earlier this year, together with our parent company Nordic Business Group, we submitted our first forest protection application. The plan is to protect the 34 hectares of biodiverse forest land previously acquired this year.

This beautiful, diverse forest land is located on an island called Pääskynsaari, situated in Lake Puula, Hirvensalmi, in the Southern Savonia region of Finland. In this same region, LähiTapiola recently acquired a large 64 hectare area, and turned it into a nature reserve with ELY (the Finnish Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment).

If approved by ELY, our initiative would expand this nature reserve area already protected by LähiTapiola, and result in a nearly 100 hectare area where the biodiversity of this diverse landscape remains protected in the future.

“We have bought 34 hectares of beautiful forest land on an island in Lake Puula. We hope to protect the forest and its biodiversity”, says Hans-Peter Siefen, the co-founder of Business Forum Group.

We hope to continue this action of protecting valuable forest land within Finland in the years to come. After all, one of our founding values is cross-generational thinking.

“According to cross-generational thinking, we didn’t inherit this world from our parents, we merely lease it from our children. This also applies to our way of doing responsible business.”

Our Nordic Business Forum team sends a warm thank you to everyone who joined us this year online or face-to-face in Helsinki. We hope the rest of your year is relaxing and peaceful, and we hope to see you again next year!