Seeing REDD over illegal timber
One of the biggest global get-togethers has outlined plans for a climbdown on deforestation. TiC slices through papers and procrastination to find out that money really does grow on trees.
IS IT right for rich countries to pay poor countries not to cut down their forests after the rich have chopped down all theirs? Environment ministers from 190 countries met in Bali, Indonesia last December, and agreed to pilot projects that will do just this.
If successful, a programme by the rather catchy name of “reduced emissions from avoided deforestation and degradation”, or REDD, could succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
And this time the US government, which famously walked out of Kyoto, after wanting to offset its emissions against its own forests instead of making significant emission cutbacks, has shut up and signed up.
Logged out
A significant contributor to the rapacious deforestation rates, that has left places like the Philippines and Malaysia largely denuded, has been illegal logging.
In 2007, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature estimated that the UK is the third largest importer of illegal timber in the world spending approximately £712m a year on illegal wood. That works out at 3.2m cubic metres a year – an area the size of Belgium. Only China and Japan import more.
More than 65% of this timber will go into the construction sector as flooring, window frames, and door lippings and rails and general joinery. There is also a significant amount of plywood being imported, which contains tropical veneers from trees that have been felled illegally.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) last year exposed illegally sourced timber had been used in the flooring of one of the UK’s most high profile building projects, the Beetham Tower in Manchester, built by Carillion. The tropical hardwood was identified as merbau, a billion dollar a year trade in the Far East.
“Any product in the construction sector which is predominantly made of timber, is at risk of containing illegal material,” says Jago Wadley, forest campaigner at the EIA.
Key to REDD is to ensure that low-impact logging will be recognised as a way of avoiding deforestation.
“Every developing country with a major forestry resource is suffering with illegal logging and deforestation,” says Duncan Brack, associate fellow in energy, environment and development at Chatham House. “The two almost always go together. I don’t think we are talking about forest-rich countries stopping logging completely, but switching from illegal logging to sustainable methods.”
Along with the support of the US, REDD is boosted by another first. Unlike previous forestry initiatives, it has been proposed by developing countries.
The Coalition of Rainforest Nations led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica and supported by the likes of Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo basin countries are driving the proposals.
“One of the problems with forestry in general is that it often seems to be the west telling the developing countries what to do,” explains Brack. “We, having cut down all of our forests.”
Tropical supply
The percentage of certified timber sourced legally and sustainability, coming into the UK currently stands at 60%, and is growing at approximately 5% a year. But illegal timber is still making its way into the UK’s biggest building projects.
It took the EIA a matter of hours to expose illegal merbau used in Manchester’s Beetham Tower. Similarly Ken Livingstone was left with egg on his face when a scheme to refurbish Nelson’s Column in 2006 was found to be using an illegally logged timber from Papua New Guinea. The species in question was bintangor, which was shipped to China and processed into plywood.
The Timber Trade Federation estimates that the UK imports less than 6% of timber from the tropics, although the figure is not as clear-cut as it sounds, as tropical hardwood is entering the UK undetected.
Timber that is being imported from Russia and China is often illegally sourced from developing countries, says Brack. “China is a big issue because it’s turning the timber into plywood or furniture and then exporting it to Europe and Japan.
Money does grow on trees
Exporting timber is a vital source of income for developing countries, says James Mayes, head of the natural resources group at the International Institute for Environment and Development.
Mayes says Ghana is a typical economic model. “It’s not got huge forestry resources but it has a range of other things it also exports and timber is probably up there in the top 10, but not the top three.”
Those taken in by the sudden sensitivity of the developing countries with regards to their impact on the environment shouldn’t be misled. The mechanisms being proposed post- Kyoto are significantly lucrative, despite REDD being branded as a low-cost way of reducing global emissions. “They can see it’s potentially a big source of money for them,” says Brack. “The money is more important for them than saving the forests.”
Despite the intricacies of the mechanisms being at least four years from implementation, it is likely to include national level baselines and financial incentives in the form of a development fund or a market mechanism based on tradable carbon credits. It will only be for the developing countries and will not include developed Annex 1 countries – the biggest greenhouse gas polluters.
A national level baseline would reward those countries that manage to slow down rates below their current levels.
However, it is likely to provoke countries into pushing their baselines up, thereby maximizing payment and could prove difficult to calculate for those countries that have yet to deforest, but where it is predicted. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has previously been locked in a civil war, but now things have clamed down it is widely tipped that their forests will disappear quickly.
“I think most people see that it will be done through a market mechanism,” says Brack. “The sheer size of the money is slightly above probably what donor countries are willing to pay. What is likely is some sort of mix.”
Laws of the jungle
Mayes says unless REDD addresses land rights and property rights for local communities
which see the same few profit and the same few starve and go without shelter, then it will intensify rather than reverse conditions.
Mayes who has worked with forestry in both West Africa and Asia says REDD must get good forestry thinking installed quickly.
“One of the big unrecognised characteristics of the tropical timber business is that the norm really is small-scale operations,” he says. “A lot of cutting and running in the tropical timber business is directly linked to poor people’s livelihoods. Some of the laws are contradictory so there are perverse incentives for getting rid of a lot of forests to make way for things like soya or oil palm.”
Oil palm for biofuel is seen as one of the best ways of saving the planet from greenhouse gasses. However, it often provides a way of providing cover for companies to strip out the last stands of timber not already lost to illegal loggers. Companies are getting permission to tear down forests for oil palm plantations, then cutting and running with the timber before they plant.
There is also the issue of bloodshed. In the past revenues from timber have been used to fund conflicts. These include countries such as Cambodia, Liberia and the DRC, where there is still fighting going on. “At the height of the fighting I think quite a lot of money from the armed groups was coming from timber, as well as other natural resources,” says Brack.
Indeed if REDD is to have the smallest chance of success it must appreciate what kind of world it is entering, says Wadley.
Wadley attended the conference in Indonesia last December and has carried out investigative work into illegal logging and corruption in the host country. He says Indonesia has one of the worst illegal logging problems estimating that the country loses between £1.5bn ($3bn) and £2.5bn ($5bn) a year in concessions and taxes as a result.
“In places like Indonesia you’ve got military police going into communities with investors and effectively protecting their illegal operations on the ground by hanging around with machine guns as positions of authority,” says Wadley.
In November 2001 a local journalist investigating links between a local illegal timber baron in Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia was attacked with machetes, spears and acid, and left in the road. He was assumed dead, and was nearly taken to the morgue, before someone saw that his foot was still moving.
Planting the seed
The impact of illegal logging is not only losing developing countries money but it is also depressing global timber prices by as much as 20%.
Further challenges come with aligning REDD with a bundle of existing governance initiatives. Most significant of all is the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan.
This creates Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and timber-producing countries that ensures exported products are verified legal and sustainable. Negotiations are currently taking place with Indonesia, Ghana, Cameroon and Malaysia. Brack expects the first agreement to be signed this year.
“At the moment FLEGT is only accepted in the EU and a few timber producer countries,” says Brack. “Because there is no overall scheme it is having to do it though separate agreements which is quite a lot of work and is time intensive.” Brack is hopeful that FLEGT will evolve into a multilateral process that mimics the Kimberley process – that keeps “conflict diamonds”, used to finance rebel wars against legitimate governments, out of world markets.
If FLEGT works properly it is hoped importers will source timber from any country signed up to the agreement.
Mayes says there is a danger in confusing European countries over the glut of fragmented legislation. “Put it this way; if the European market is so confused that it can’t be bothered with certification followed by legality requirements, followed by REDD, then one could understand. It is desperately in the interests of the tropical forest countries not to let that happen because they value these markets.”
Mayes warns that it won’t take an awful lot for Ghanaian exporters to decide they’re better off exporting within the West African region or over to China. “It is fairly fragile stuff,” he says.
Promise or peril?
From the outset any mechanism trying to get over 100 countries to agree to anything will be tricky. But the fact it has been engineered by developing countries is a show of promise.
Despite being more than four years away, its impacts, if successful, will be huge for the timber trade.
Paying countries not to deforest is likely to reduce the amount of timber on the market and send prices skywards. Having said that, burgeoning forests in both Russia, Canada and some parts of Europe, notably the Nordic countries and Germany, will ensure that the overall supply of wood won’t be a problem. “It depends on what extent temperate forests and tropical can be substitutable,” says Brack.
He is also confident that initiatives like REDD and FLEGT will increase the availability of certified legal timber.
Curiously, he says, the UK demand for certified timber is a lot lower than supply. This, in part, is due to the impact of government procurement policy. “Importers can see the likelihood of more of their customers demanding certified products,” says Brack. “They prefer to have simple supply sources and just deal with suppliers who can prove legality.
“Timber importers in the UK would like big construction firms to start demanding certified timber and a lot of them aren’t at the moment,” he says.
Those who feel certified timber is too costly and labour intensive, need only to imagine what will happen if current levels of deforestation continue, he says. “If climate change carries on unchecked then nobody’s going to be making a living very well.”
