Ingka Group Buys Florida Land Destroyed by Hurricane

Ingka Group, the owners of the IKEA furniture chain, just bought 3,264 acres of forest in Florida that had been destroyed by a hurricane in order to restore it with longleaf pine. The land near Florida’s Apalachicola River was damaged by Hurricane Michael. According to the Florida Forest Service via the National Weather Service, Michael’s heavy winds damaged approximately 3 million acres of forested land in Florida worth $1.2 billion dollars.

The land is named Tupelo Honey, and Ingka has plans to treat the new purchase as an afforestation project. The company’s commitment to carbon neutrality has gradually accumulated more than 600,000 forested acres in the U.S., Europe, and New Zealand to offset the CO2 released during its entire value chain.

In a statement, Ingka Group said “The new forests will support increased biodiversity, help ensure sustainable timber production from responsibly managed forests, and recover land damaged by Hurricane Michael in October 2018. The afforestation business… is a long-term investment that consolidates our business while also positively impacting the climate through the absorption of CO2 during the forests’ growth.”

Ingka Group’s goal, set out in 2020, is to eliminate their carbon footprint. Today more than 98% of the wood used for IKEA products is either FSC-certified or recycled. If the retail giant can keep the forests healthy and alive, in 40 years they will pull carbon out of the air equal to a certain percentage of the carbon placed into the atmosphere by IKEA’s operations, while providing valuable habitat to vulnerable species like the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise, pine snakes, and dusky gopher frogs.

In 2021, IKEA bought 11,000 acres in Georgia that had been damaged by Hurricane Michael to stop it from being clear-cut and developed. In that instance Ingka teamed up with The Conservation Fund to create working forests that are harvested and regenerated sustainably to save the cost of managing them, while also being placed along important biodiversity corridors, or to stop habitat fragmentation.