Customer stories • 10 Apr 2025
How New Forests streamlined operations with BlueLayer
Opportunity
New Forests is a global investment management firm. Since first establishing its presence in the U.S. in 2007, the firm has expanded its regional scope from a single strategy focused on carbon project development to five strategies managing integrated landscapes of natural capital, including for timber, conservation, and forest carbon. With this growing portfolio of complex forest carbon projects, the team realised the need to review existing processes and look for a solution to streamline inventory management and sales workflows to better inform decision making and scale efficiently. Recognising this opportunity, New Forests sought a comprehensive digital platform that could restructure inventory architectures to increase operational efficiencies and provide real-time insights.
The New Forests team explored several solutions, including off-the-shelf, industry-agnostic sales and inventory management platforms as well as building in-house. These options fell short, not providing the level of detail or tangible efficiency gains the team required, or necessitated extensive, big-lift set-up processes that would set the team back in time and resource, jeopardising their growth potential.
Instead, BlueLayer emerged as a new alternative in the market offering a carbon-specific operating system. Our team is building an industry first end-to-end software platform for carbon project developers and we have expanded our partnerships and footprint as a trusted leader in carbon project operations and information management. As a first-mover, we value partnerships with experts in carbon project development to inform development of the functionality and capabilities of the BlueLayer platform.
Solution
New Forests was introduced to BlueLayer and quickly realised the synergies; both teams were aligned in their ambition to build the digital infrastructure to streamline carbon inventory and order management, unlocking efficiencies and growth potential. The teams undertook a collaborative partnership, leveraging BlueLayer’s technology expertise and mission to service the global carbon market and New Forests' extensive forest carbon project experience.
Outcome
Together, the teams co-designed new features for the BlueLayer platform, enabling project developers to consolidate information from across projects in one centralised view. With this tooling, the New Forests team can easily access a reliable, accurate and holistic view of their credit development process, inventory, and sales activity in real-time. The new features also generate powerful insight dashboards and customised invoice and transaction reporting, which is seamlessly shared with stakeholders to facilitate alignment, communication, and trust.
Image 1: Renewable energy is produced by a wind farm on New Forests’ timberland investment in Oklahoma, USA.
Working with BlueLayer
New Forests and BlueLayer engaged in a partnership in early 2023 to co-design new platform features and functionalities that directly addressed New Forests’ needs.
The two teams met weekly throughout the duration of the project to continuously and iteratively incorporate feedback while refining new platform features in alignment with shared expectations.
Critically, the expertise and input from the New Forests team ensured the design of the features not only met their needs, but more broadly positioned the platform to address the requirements of large-scale developers and complex edge cases. BlueLayer benefitted from having the undivided attention of and consistent input from one of the world’s largest and most prestigious project developers, as well as hands on support by testing the platform live as it was being developed.
Together, the teams built BlueLayer’s Credit Management product, including functionality to address both Inventory Management and Order Management. This product includes key features, such as:
- A centralised, accurate view of credit inventory across all projects and verification cycles
- Comprehensive tracking of orders, offers & proposals, contracts, and delivery milestones
- Live sync with registries, eliminating manual data entry
- Audit logs that track every change, ensuring compliance
- Real-time dashboards and customisable reports to automate invoicing
Image 2: View of the McCloud Forest carbon project with northern California’s Mount Shasta (USA) in the background.
The result
New Forests has consolidated previous workflows and moved their full carbon inventory management and sales processes into one centralised platform. The team has transferred 25 projects to the BlueLayer platform, totalling millions of credits to be generated annually for the California compliance market, as well as the voluntary carbon market.
BlueLayer has continued its growth by building on the Credit Management product and adding products for Project Management, Channels & Revenue Management and dMRV.
BlueLayer continues to work closely with the New Forests team to test new platform features, incorporating feedback to ensure the platform is continuously improving and helping developers overcome the challenges of managing large-scale, complex carbon portfolios.
Working with the New Forests team has been transformative for BlueLayer. Their expertise and collaborative approach during our co-development partnership helped us design platform features that remain integral to our end-to-end solution for project developers. Real-time testing and direct feedback from one of the industry's most experienced teams enabled us to deliver comprehensive, future-ready solutions.
Our ongoing partnership with the New Forests team continues to push our platform forward. Their insights drive the development of new features, ensuring we stay ahead of industry challenges and provide solutions that meet the demands of managing large-scale, complex portfolios.
Empowering the team with operational excellence
Working with BlueLayer has transformed New Forests’ credit inventory and sales processes, empowering them to meet the demands of their growing portfolio with confidence. It has also increased the team’s credibility with external stakeholders such as investors and long-term buyers.
Since implementing BlueLayer in 2023, our asset management team has seen enormous value in the platform. BlueLayer has simplified our workflows, improved data quality, and empowered the team to focus on driving value from our projects and delivering high-quality credits to the market. It's been a transformative shift in our operations.
Streamlining operations to be more efficient at scale
Internally, the platform has driven new efficiency by simplifying workflows and improving collaboration. Team members can now focus on strategic initiatives rather than time-consuming, manual processes.
BlueLayer's automated updates, relational databases, and real-time dashboards have transformed how we manage our carbon inventory. Tasks that once required substantial manual and QAQC effort are now seamless and immediately accurate, giving us the confidence to scale efficiently.
Looking forward
As New Forests continues to scale its carbon and natural capital operations, BlueLayer remains an important enabler of their success. With expanded features and product offerings, the platform is continuously advancing to provide the robust technological foundation needed to manage a growing carbon portfolio, while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and efficiency.
Interested in learning more about BlueLayer?
About New Forests
New Forests is a global investment manager of nature-based real assets and natural capital strategies, with USD 7 billion in assets under management across over 4.2 million hectares of investments. The company manages a diversified global portfolio of sustainable timberlands and natural forests, conservation areas, carbon and conservation finance projects, agriculture, timber processing, and infrastructure.
New Forests’ managed portfolio in the U.S. consists of carbon projects and forestland assets across diverse geographies, including California, Alaska, New England, and the U.S. South. New Forests goes beyond traditional forestry management to encompass returns driven by conservation management strategies and the value of ecosystem services. They embrace new and innovative technologies, such as proprietary geospatial analytics, to identify and manage high carbon value forests and work closely with local communities, including Native American tribes to support sustainable and intertwined economic and environmental objectives. Recent impact includes, for example, carbon project collaborations with Alaska Native Corporations and ongoing work toward extending rotations on managed Loblolly pine plantations in the U.S. South and natural forests in the western U.S.
Image 3: Forested creek on a recent timberland investment made by New Forests in Oklahoma, USA.
Additional information:
Image 1: New Forests intends to enroll the timberlands around the windfarm in a forest carbon project.
Image 2: This carbon project is under development and will provide carbon offsets to the California-Cap-and-Trade program.
Image 3: The timberlands are a multi-use forest, with an operating wind farm, commercial recreational leases across the entire forest, a mixture of natural and plantation stands, and a wealth of biodiversity that includes recovering indicator species such as the American black bear. New Forests intends to develop a carbon project while contributing to the local circular bioeconomy by producing sawtimber-sized logs.
Disclaimer: This document is intended solely for discussion and illustrative purposes and does not constitute advice or a recommendation to enter into any investment, project, or transaction. It does not represent an offer to buy or sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, any interest, security, or other financial product. This document has been prepared without consideration of any prospective investor’s objectives, financial situation, or needs, and it does not purport to contain all the information that a person may require to evaluate whether to conduct further due diligence or consider an investment in New Forests’ private funds. Prospective investors should not construe the contents of this document as legal, tax, investment, business, accounting, financial, or other advice. Each prospective investor is encouraged to consult its own advisers regarding legal, business, tax, and other relevant matters concerning an investment in New Forests’ private funds.
