Money grows on trees – new profit opportunities of sequestrating carbon for private forest owners in Finland

The objective of this Master’s thesis was to explore new profit opportunities of sequestering carbon for private forest owners in Finland. it examined the new possibilities that forests represent in a world, where CO2 needs to be sequestered from the atmosphere. The study takes a practical point of view: incorporating climate change mitigation and forests in a profitable manner. It works towards filling research gaps in alternative uses of forests, and how carbon sinks in forests could be made profitable and whilst mitigating climate change. The study followed an extensive case study approach and incorporated multiple qualitative approaches. Two types of qualitative data were collected: data collected through ten semi-structured interviews with key actors, and other forestry related materials. These included arboriculture literature, environmental reports and statistics as well as company documents from large forest companies in Finland. The study used a stakeholder value creation framework to define five generic categories of stakeholders. This case study showed that the new profit opportunities have several levels. This Master’s thesis contributes to forestry literature in Finland as well as compensation research globally by its application of stakeholder theory to developing new profit models for forest carbon credits. It was found that profitable models for sequestration are emerging for Finnish forest owners, although the profits in traditional forestry are higher at current price levels of wood and carbon sequestration, respectively. Further, based on the results, a new profit model for private forest owners in Finland was proposed