• Client: FORESTAL ARAUCO S.A.

• Year: 2024

• eftec Team: Ian Dickie, Ece Ozdemiroglu, Tiziana Papa, Mark Collar, Paul Chung, Ally Couchman, Natalya Kharadi

– ARAUCO Nature Strategy, 2023

Context

ARAUCO is a Chilean forestry company with over 1,000,000 hectares of forest assets in Chile that provide a range of benefits to the economy and society in addition to timber: including amenity, carbon storage, conservation, and other ecosystem services. We supported Arauco to account for these benefits and understand the values of their natural capital assets, the risks to this asset value, and the costs and benefits of maintenance.

Our work

We worked with ARAUCO to scope their accounting process, organise the data needed and prepared their Natural Capital Accounts.

These accounts present the economic value of the natural capital and costs of its maintenance in the familiar format of a balance sheet. The accounts were aligned with Scope 1 in the BS 8632:2021 standard on Natural Capital Accounting for Organizations, covering natural capital assets that ARAUCO owns and manages, including productive forests and significant proportions of conservation areas.

The ARAUCO Natural Capital Balance Sheet:

• Is disaggregated to ARAUCO’s regional landscapes in Chile;  

• Shows the distribution of values to different beneficiaries;

• Present the costs of maintenance actions such as buffer management, restoration, and other activities, and

• Projects natural capital values over the next 20 years to enable discussion of how the benefits can be sustained over time.

Results

Natural Capital Balance Sheet for ARAUCO showed that while timber sales continue to provide the most financial value to the company, significant value to society is also generated from carbon sequestration in ARUACO’s productive and conservation forests.

In fact, it demonstrated that value to society can be significantly higher than value to ARAUCO (e.g., the role of the forests in rural water supplies). This makes a strong case for the continued maintenance of the assets as part of ARAUCO’s social responsibilities, and to ensure good community relationships and continued social license to operate.

Future projection highlighted potential risks, showing that as external pressures increase (most prominently from the impacts of climate change) so might the costs to maintain the assets to sustain the benefits.

Recommendations

We found that data collected by ARAUCO for their management accounts and sustainability reporting align well with data needed to develop and report natural capital accounts. There is room for improving the data process to improve integration such as by linking timber harvesting data and carbon sequestration across productive forests. This could also help understand how the synergies and trade-offs between different benefits from natural capital can be managed.

Outcome: International Recognition & Government Collaboration

We supported ARAUCO in their pioneering corporate action on nature in Chile which also involves  publishing their nature strategy in 2023 through the It’s Now for Nature campaign.

ARAUCO joined a session convened by the TNFD (Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures) at COP 16 of the Convention on Biodiversity in Cali, Colombia in October 2024, to present their natural capital accounting work to conference delegates. They also held an event with Acción Empresas and the Global Reporting Initiative on business engagement with biodiversity.

As one of three companies in Chile that pioneered nature strategies in 2023, ARAUCO became one of 14 companies to establish the Business Advisory Group on biodiversity to support the Government of Chile to effectively include the private sector in national biodiversity actions.

In 2025, the World Economic Forum published an article on this collaborative effort, which stated that Chile ‘leads the way’ as an internationally leading example of business-government collaboration on biodiversity. ARAUCO are specifically cited by the WEF as one of the leading companies in the effort, who “set new levels of ambition and accountability for other Chilean companies to follow”.