Worldwide action has dramatically cut illegal logging across the globe, report says

Report: Illegal logging down across the globe

LONDON — Tougher enforcement and strict new rules have led to a dramatic drop in illegal logging, a British think tank says, saving huge swaths of green and cutting carbon dioxide emissions across the globe.

An international clamp-down on unlawfully harvested timber has helped protect up to 17 million hectares (42 million acres) of forest over the past few years — roughly the same area covered by the state of Illinois, according to a report published Thursday by the London-based Chatham House.

Since 2002, the report said, total global production of illegal timber has fallen by nearly 25 percent.

“We’re a quarter of the way there,” said Sam Lawson, one of the report’s authors. He expressed the hope that newer regulations — such as a European law passed last week that will ban the import of illegal timber by 2012 — would cut the amount of illegal logging even further.

“A lot of the action that’s been taken happened recently and can’t be expected to have been trickled down to the level of the forest yet,” he said.

Illegal logging in the Amazon has already been cut by between 50 and 75 percent, with similar drops recorded in Indonesia and Cameroon, the report found.

That’s good news for the fight to contain climate change, in part because forests help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It’s also good news for cash-strapped governments in the developing world, who can recoup revenue lost to illegal logging, and for local people who rely on the forest for their livelihood.

“The net benefits from that are huge, in terms of the climate, in terms of poverty-reduction, and in terms of the environment generally,” Lawson said.

The scale of the problem remains daunting. In 2008 some 100 million cubic meters (3.5 billion cubic feet) of timber was illegally harvested from Brazil, Indonesia, Cameroon, Ghana, and Malaysia. Laid end to end, the logs would circle the Earth more than 10 times over.

A big chunk of that timber is processed in China and makes its way to the West in the form of plywood and furniture. The U.S., the U.K., Japan, France, and the Netherlands spent $8.4 billion buying illegally harvested wood in 2008, the report said.

But new laws — like the one passed in Europe, and the amended Lacey Act, passed in the U.S. in 2008 — have criminalized the handling of illegally sourced timber. Back in producer countries, tighter enforcement has shut down rogue logging operations in places like Indonesia’s national parks.

Some activists — such as Paulo Adario, the coordinator of Greenpeace’s Amazon campaign — say that global economic downturn has also played a role in putting a damper on illegal logging.

Lawson acknowledged that was part of the story.

“There is a bit of that,” he said. “But the reductions that we saw began much earlier than the economic slowdown.

“Illegal timber hasn’t just gone down in terms of volume, it’s gone down in terms of percentage of the wood being harvested.”

Lawson said there were still enormous challenges: While laws prohibiting the use of illegal timber into Europe and North America may have dented the export market, small-scale illegal timber harvesting for local use was unaffected.

“In Africa, illegal logging for the domestic market is huge and remains unchanged,” he said.

Internationally, rules against the use of illegal wood remain patchy. The report singled out Japan as a country where imports of illicitly cut timber was particularly high. And Lawson expressed the hope that developing countries would sit up and take notice of the West’s efforts to fight the illegal timber trade.

“If China were to follow suit, there’d be a huge impact,” he said.

Online:

www.chathamhouse.org.uk/