Corporate Vandals Beware!
Wilderness Society is part of an international trend for non-government organisations to increasingly focus on the performance of corporations. As consumers and investors our voices are powerful in a globalised economy. For many years corporations believed that as long as they obeyed the law, that was all that was required of them. People around the globe are calling on corporations to be responsible to the people and the planet on which they rely. Currently Wilderness Society is focusing its corporate campaign on Gunns Ltd, the company responsible for the logging and woodchipping of Tasmania’s old growth forests. The campaign is calling on Gunns Ltd to quit logging old growth forests, shifting instead to re-growth and plantation forests. This will have minimal financial implications for the company and ensure long term business certainty and sustainability by shifting the operation to non-contentious resources.
The campaign targets institutional shareholders, calling on fund managers such as Perpetual and Colonial First State (owned by Commonwealth Bank) to use their clout as Gunns’ major shareholders to demand the operations move onto a more sustainable footing. The campaign, working with ethical shareholders also puts forward resolutions to financial institutions calling on them to ensure that their loans and investments do not destroy forests of high conservation value. In August 2003 Gunns Ltd’s shareholders called an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss and vote on the continuing logging of old growth forests. The resolution was not carried. For more information see the Gunns Ltd subtopic on the right had side of your screen.
For more information, please contact:
Leanne Minshull
Corporate Campaigner
Email Leanne Minshull
Created: 21 Aug 2003 | Last updated: 21 Aug 2003