The holiday season brings an avalanche of deliveries. Millions of boxes arrive at doorsteps worldwide, each one representing a connection between commerce and forest ecosystems most of us never think about. But what if those boxes could tell a different story—one where supply chains don’t just avoid harming forests, but actively regenerate them?
That’s the vision behind Big Idea 7: Supply Chains as Forest Regeneration Catalysts—a transformative concept explored in my latest conversation with Sophie Beckham, Chief Sustainability Officer at International Paper and a forestry expert with deep partnerships across organizations like The Nature Conservancy and WWF.
Beyond Compliance: From Deforestation-Free to Forest-Positive
The conversation started where many forest discussions begin today: the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). With its implementation timeline uncertain and regulations evolving, companies face a strategic question: Do you wait for regulatory clarity, or do you move forward with solutions that create value regardless?
Sophie’s answer is clear: “We focus on no-regrets actions—what would we do anyway as good business practice?”
For a 126-year-old company like International Paper, this means thinking beyond compliance minimums to ask bigger questions: How do we treat the materials our entire business model depends upon? How do we build trust with forest landowners? How do we ensure solutions are durable, not just defensible?
The Living Infrastructure Paradigm
Here’s where the conversation shifted from incremental improvement to genuine transformation.
Traditional supply chain thinking treats forests as resource extraction points—locations where raw materials are harvested and moved into production systems. But Sophie introduced a radically different frame: forests as living infrastructure.
“Our mills are the size of football pitches,” she explained. “You can’t move them. If your sourcing region is 100 miles around the mill, you can’t deplete that resource and just pick up and move.”
This creates a fundamentally different relationship with natural systems. When your commercial operations are geographically locked to specific forest ecosystems, you must nurture that living infrastructure for the long term. It’s not optional. It’s existential.
Nature as the Silent Guarantor of All Other Capital
Perhaps the most powerful insight from our conversation came when Sophie shared a framing that “resonated so much” with her:
“Nature is the silent guarantor of all other capital.”
Let that sink in.
Every form of capital we create—financial, manufactured, human, social—ultimately depends on the natural capital that underpins it. Yet we rarely value the full spectrum of goods and services forests provide: biodiversity, water quality, carbon sequestration, soil health, climate regulation.
Sophie described her work as operating across a spectrum: from risk management (ensuring legal and ethical sourcing) to investing in regenerative approaches (actively improving ecosystem health). Both are necessary. Both create value.
But the regenerative end of that spectrum requires something more: unsentimental valuation of forest goods and services combined with deep sentiment about their importance.
Technology as an Enabler of Regeneration
One of the most practical insights from our conversation centered on how technology enables early interventions that improve forest outcomes.
International Paper has built Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that help identify where fiber comes from while capturing data on biodiversity, water, forest connectivity, and other ecosystem indicators. This creates transparency for stakeholders while providing technical resources to landowners who might not have sophisticated systems themselves.
The beauty of this approach? It shifts the burden of data collection and analysis to the entity with the most resources (the corporation) while creating actionable insights for the landowners who manage the actual forests.
But Sophie emphasized something critical: “We need to not wait for perfect data to start to act.”
This is regenerative supply chain leadership in practice—using the best available information to make interventions that improve outcomes while continuing to refine data quality over time.
The Long Game: Forest Time vs. Quarter Time
One of the fundamental tensions in forest-positive supply chains is reconciling forest time scales with corporate time scales.
Trees don’t operate on quarterly cycles. Every harvest decision impacts what that forest looks like in 10, 20, 30, and 40 years. Yet businesses face pressure for short-term returns.
Sophie’s response to this tension is instructive: International Paper has evolved from “utilitarian forestry” to a more sophisticated approach that recognizes and optimizes for multiple forest values simultaneously—wood fiber for commercial use, habitat for species, water quality, carbon sequestration.
“It doesn’t have to mean a compromise in economic value to the landowner or the material that goes into things like boxes,” she explained. “It means reconsidering how you think about the forest system.”
This is the essence of regenerative transformation: not accepting false trade-offs between economic value and ecosystem health, but instead designing systems that optimize for both.
Climate Adaptation: Planning for Forests That Don’t Exist Yet
When James George asked about climate-driven species migration, Sophie’s response revealed the frontier of forest management: planning for ecosystems that are changing in real-time.
Forest managers with large land holdings and long time horizons are already anticipating where pests, diseases, wildlife, and water patterns are shifting. They’re using climate data from insurers and asset managers to inform adaptation strategies.
But the real challenge isn’t gradual change—it’s extreme weather events that are becoming less predictable. Hurricanes and floods in regions that historically never experienced them. Atmospheric rivers causing massive flooding and uprooted trees. Droughts where rain was once reliable.
“The predictability is really where we have to lean into the best available climate data,” Sophie noted, “and think specifically and intentionally about what we do differently as a company.”
For supply chains, this means resilience planning isn’t optional—it’s the price of admission for long-term viability.
The Holiday Box: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary
During the holiday season, consumers receive millions of boxes without thinking about their origin. Sophie posed a beautiful question: How do we make this “low emotion product” carry the story of forests as living systems?
Her answer has practical implications for consumers and companies alike:
For Consumers:
- Recycle boxes to feed the circular system (US boxes are ~35% recycled content; Europe is in the high 90s)
- Choose fiber-based packaging when possible, as it creates economic incentives for landowners to keep forests as forests
- Look for companies thinking responsibly about the resources they use
For Companies:
- Design packaging fit for purpose—not over-packaged, but optimized for protection and material efficiency
- Build transparent supply chains that can trace fiber back to forest sources
- Partner with conservation organizations that bring different perspectives and challenge conventional approaches
The Carbon Opportunity: Small Landowners, Big Impact
As our conversation concluded, Sophie highlighted an emerging opportunity that could reshape forest economics: family forest landowners creating carbon additionality.
“As long as the rain falls and the sun shines, trees are going to sequester carbon,” she noted. And we’re starting to see fantastic examples of small family forest landowners who manage sustainably while creating additional carbon value in their landscapes.
This is where natural capital solutions become tangible: forests delivering multiple goods and services simultaneously—fiber for commerce, habitat for biodiversity, watershed protection, and climate mitigation through carbon sequestration.
Sophie’s optimism for 2026 centered on this opportunity: “Working with organizations who are really authentically trying to create credibility in the voluntary carbon market—I think we’re going to see all types of breakthroughs.”
The Big Idea: Forests as More Than Resource Extraction
So what does it mean for supply chains to become forest regeneration catalysts?
It means shifting from extraction to stewardship.
It means treating forests as living infrastructure that requires active nurturing, not just sustainable harvesting.
It means valuing the full spectrum of forest goods and services, even when markets don’t perfectly price them.
It means using technology to enable early interventions that improve ecosystem health.
It means planning for forest futures that may look different than forest pasts due to climate change.
And it means creating economic models where keeping forests healthy and biodiverse is the most profitable long-term strategy.
As Sophie powerfully stated: “If we give forests the chance, they can be so much more than just a source of fiber for a box. They can be so much more for nature, they can be so much more in terms of long-term value. Why wouldn’t we lean into that?”
Your Turn: From Consumer to Steward
This holiday season, before you toss that next delivery box into recycling (or worse, trash), pause for a moment.
Think about the forest landowner who managed the trees that became that box. Think about the species that depend on that forest habitat. Think about the water quality that forest protects. Think about the carbon that forest sequesters.
Then recycle that box. Better yet, reuse it. And when you have purchasing power—whether as a consumer or a supply chain leader—choose companies that see forests as partners, not just resources.
Because nature is the silent guarantor of all other capital. And the supply chains that thrive in the decades ahead will be those that learned to regenerate the natural systems they depend upon.
Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Beckham on the Supply Chain Revolution podcast, part of our 10 Big Ideas to Transform Supply Chains for a Regenerative Future series.
About Sophie Beckham: Chief Sustainability Officer at International Paper with over 20 years pioneering regenerative forestry approaches. Former Global Forestry Manager at IKEA, with a master’s degree in forestry from Yale and deep partnerships with The Nature Conservancy and WWF.
What’s your relationship with forests? Share your thoughts in the comments below, or connect with me on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about regenerative supply chains.
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