THE past weeks have brought rare good news for the world’s forests. On July 15th a new study found that worldwide harvests of illegal timber dropped by 22% over the past decade, with declines reaching as high as 50-75% in the major timber-producing countries of Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon. In a victory for greens and governments alike, the preserved trees represent between 1.2 billion and 14.6 billion tonnes of cheaply averted carbon emissions, or $6.5 billion in potential government revenues if they were logged legally.
The study, issued by the London think-tank Chatham House, suggests that international efforts to improve forest monitoring and enforcement drove the declines. But below the marquee findings, the report’s optimism is more qualified.
The authors point out that inconsistent policies and weak legal systems defang timber laws in producer countries, threatening hard-won successes. In Brazil, for example, timber prosecutions languish in gridlocked courts for years, even decades. And though the value of fines levied against violators has risen more than eightfold since 2003, some states collect as little as 2.5% of these penalties.
The sheer scale of illegal logging also tempers the report’s rosy message. However encouraging, recent improvements accrue from a truly dreadful baseline: in the early years of the study, nearly half the tropical logs, sawn timber, and plywood traded worldwide was illegal. (In Indonesia, one of the world’s largest timber producers, more than 80% of logs were cut illegally in 2001.) Even after a decade-long decline, 100m cubic metres of illicit timber are still stripped from forests each year.
Unfortunately, future improvements will be more difficult. Unlike the industrial-scale skulduggery targeted thus far, remaining forms of illegal logging are hard to detect. Regulators struggle to catch companies that overharvest within the boundaries of legally granted lands or deliberately misidentify prohibited tree species as legal ones. Smaller-scale cutting for domestic markets is often overlooked. And government corruption is a perennial bugbear, with murky licensing procedures often masking illegal timber concessions. (Indeed, the report acknowledges that current estimates almost certainly undercount such violations.)
Better oversight may help rein in abuses. Cameroon won plaudits for its donor-financed monitoring scheme, which established an independent regulator to tackle illegal logging in the face of widespread corruption. And Brazil is replacing a rickety, paper-based timber permit program with online certifications, allowing regulators to track timber flows electronically through harvest, processing and export. The technology is not infallible—in 2008, authorities caught logging companies hacking into the system to launder 1.7 million cubic metres of illegal timber. But despite its “teething problems”, this integrated, (generally) tamper-resistant approach may yet improve accountability in the country’s logging operations.
Such accountability is growing more important as consumer countries clamp down on illegal timber. In another victory for forest advocates, the European Parliament voted on July 7th to prohibit imports of illegally harvested wood products starting in 2012, echoing a similar US ban passed in 2008. The new rules demand that importers verify the legality of their supply chains or face sanctions (though penalties will be left up to individual member countries). Regulators hope that such demand-side regulation will make it harder to profit from ill-gotten timber.
It’s a good start. But changing patterns of timber trade will challenge the laws’ effectiveness. In 2002, 85% of illegal wood products came straight from the country of harvest to consumer countries; six years later, only about half did, as illegal timber increasingly detoured through third-party processing nations like China before arriving in the form of finished products. With their opaque supply chains and lax import regulations, such middlemen provide an easy entry point for contraband logs. Regulators have earned the right to celebrate their accomplishments, but a daunting flood of illegal timber remains.
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