Lawyers for Forests opposes export woodchipping and the logging of old growth and other high conservation value forests and calls for an end to the current regime of unsustainable industrialised logging in public forests.

Lawyers for Forests encourages its members to:

o become aware of the corporate interests behind the woodchipping of Australia’s native forests;

o encourage their workplaces to avoid paper and pulp products from unsustainable sources in favour of recycled or environmentally sensitive alternatives;

o choose ethical investment options;

o join green shareholder groups.

The Corporate Awareness (CA) Committee has now been subsumed under the Law and Policy Committee, so we no longer have separate meetings for our CA work. However, we still have some significant ongoing projects, such as:

• Becoming Forest-Friendly - the Eco-Kit for Law Firms
  The aim of the "Forest Friendly" Eco Kit is to detail some easy, cheap and effective ways for your firm to reduce the impact it has on our environment, and in particular our native forest resources Download it now
  
  
• Lobbying super funds
  We remain in discussion with the Legal Industry Superannuation Scheme (LISS) and the Victorian Solicitors Superannuation Fund (VSSF) in which many of our members are invested to offer members a socially responsible investment (SRI) investment option. SRI funds use various methods to integrate environmental considerations into their investment decisions.
  

SRI products are available in the Australian superannuation market, and are currently being offered to the members of a number of superannuation funds including UniSuper, VicSuper, HESTA and the CSS/PSS. In fact, 155 of superannuation trustees responding to a survey in March 2001 reported that their funds currently offer members a socially responsible investment option. Unfortunately, some of these funds invest in companies that many people do not consider environmentally beneficial, including mining companies.

“Deep green” funds will only invest in environmentally beneficial companies, such as companies involved in developing environmental technologies or renewable energies. They impose positive and negative screens, respectively, to select those companies that operate responsibly and sustainably and screen out those that do not or that engage in activities or produce goods that are not considered environmentally sound (eg companies involved in logging old growth forests or mining uranium). An example of one of the very few such funds operating in Australia is Australian Ethical Investments.

We strongly encourage LFF members to write to the trustees of their superannuation fund and state their interest in investing in an SRI option.