World demand for both timber and wood-fibre based products remains high but competition within the sector is also intense. Improvements in efficiency, quality and timely supply are the key
to success.
Environmental issues now dominate the risk profile of much of the sector, ranking along with fire, engineering and health and safety risks. Emerging issues (which have compliance as well as sustainability imperatives) include:
- Energy conservation & efficiency
- Effluents, waste management, and water conservation
- Genetic engineering in species improvement
- Bio-security at borders to prevent importation of pests and disease
- Environment-friendly silviculture, including sustainable logging
- Carbon-sink strategic importance of forests
- Impacts of the Southern Oscillation on forest-fire risk levels
- Soil management and watershed modification
Continual improvement is essential. In pulp & paper, milling and manufacturing plants, best-practice reliability maintenance is giving higher plant utilisation; while in forestry, hi-tech profiling technologies maximise the yield of each tree. New forms of manufactured timber products improve efficiency of fibre use but generate product liability that may extend through the life of a building.
Acquisitions and takeovers create multi-national organisations with interests in both hemispheres, spanning diverse political, cultural and natural hazards regimes. Due diligence risk estimations of maximum foreseeable loss must evaluate these natural hazards as well as future value of forests. However, these geographically diversified asset clusters are suited to mixes of insurance and alternative risk transfer (ART) to protect budgets and smooth balance sheets.
Marsh has helped many Australian forest-based clients (including secondary industries such as packaging) to address all of these risk issues in innovative and efficient ways. Services to multi-national clients are delivered via coordinated global service plans.