LONDON, United Kingdom — A coalition of 12 major investment firms are asking 200 U.K. companies to disclose their forestry practices and what they're doing to combat deforestation.

The new Forest Footprint Disclosure Project, similar to the Carbon Disclosure Project, wants detailed information on the forestry practices of the companies' entire supply chains and wants them to report on what they are doing to prevent or roll back deforestation. The project is also providing the companies with information on how to calculate how much deforestation they are directly or indirectly causing.

The investors are initially targeting 150 companies on the FTSE 500 Index and 50 others that potentially have impacts on forest levels.

The information will be gathered in an annual report that will be released in January 2010. The report will summarize the results of the research, highlight effective practices, state which companies did not respond to the request for information, compare the performance of companies within the same sector, and look at how climate change and regulations could impact their forestry practices.

The project is organized under the Global Canopy Programme and launched this week with funding from the government and charitable foundations.

The project is modeled after the Carbon Disclosure Project, which is part of the Forest Footprint Disclosure Project's steering committee, although the two do not overlap. The Carbon Disclosure Project does not cover risks related to deforestation directly, and it also does not cover greenhouse gas emissions related to deforestation.

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