The social performance of forestry and paper companies is much less advanced than their sense of environmental responsibility, according to a study by the Swiss bank Sarasin.
Sarasin came to its conclusions after examining various aspects of the environmental and social performance of 12 of the world’s large forestry and paper groups.
It found ‘big improvements’ had been made over the past ten years in the environmental record of most of the companies, and that they had often been leaders in this field.
But progress had been much slower on social responsibility. It warned that the acceptance of any forestry company ‘will no longer depend on its untarnished environmental record but increasingly also on its systematic consideration of the interests of all stakeholders’.
Environmental standards were highest in Scandinavia, while North American businesses lagged behind the Europeans, the study found.
But on social performance, US companies ‘for once seemed to be on a par with or even more advanced than their European counterparts’.
Sarasin highlights the US-based company Weyerhaeuser for its strong initiatives in education and social reporting, and praises Aracruz of Brazil for providing its workers with social benefits ‘significantly higher than the standard level’.
When researchers combined the results of their social and environmental analyses of the 12 companies, the leading four of those examined were AsiDoman (Sweden), Holmen (Sweden), SCA (Sweden) and Stora Enso (Finland).