T

his week, as Indonesia begins its year-long hosting of the Asia-Pacific Forum for Economic Cooperation (APEC), APEC member economies met to discuss current and future actions to combat illegal logging and promote trade in legal forest products. This is significant because together the APEC economies account for over 50 percent of the world’s forests and approximately 80 percent of global trade in forest products.

APEC has established an Experts Group on Illegal Logging and Associated Trade (EGILAT), and it held its third meeting in Jakarta, on Jan. 29-30. There was a lot of interest in this meeting because of the large number of actions that have been taken in recent years to try to exclude illegally harvested timber from supply chains in the region.

The impact of some of these actions are being felt immediately and what else happens in the next few years has the potential to fundamentally change, for the better, the way global timber trade occurs.

In December 2012, Australia passed a new law to prohibit illegally harvested timber from its markets. On March 3 this year the European market will formally shut its doors to illegally harvested timber when the new European Union Timber Regulation comes into force.

The large US market has already shut its doors through an amendment to the Lacey Act, which came into force in 2008. Indonesia’s compulsory system for exporters to verify the legality of a wide range of timber products (Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu) will officially come into effect in the near future.

This combination of regulations, applying to the places that create the demand for timber products, sends signals down the supply chains increasing demand for responsibly harvested and traded wood products.

These changing policy and market requirements have placed significant demands on many different actors within APEC economies to respond appropriately and do their part to comply with the laws and be able to verify the legality of the products being traded.

There is a lot of work to do across the APEC member economies to communicate these changes and support the establishment of systems and capacity needed to tell the difference between what is illegal and what is not.

There is a great demand within the wood products sectors of many APEC economies for more in-depth, business-to-business information sharing directly from buyer to supplier. These are the obvious challenges that a forum like EGILAT can help with, but there are some additional challenges that are critical to address.

The first is that the regulations prohibiting the trade in illegally harvested timber, and the national systems to verify legality, need to expand across the region to cover all the major APEC markets, otherwise illegal products rejected by one market will just be sent to another destination.

The second is that the actions so far have created a strong focus on legality. This is a necessary first step, but it is not enough. In many places in the region, the fact that timber is legally harvested does not necessarily mean that the forests that yielded the timber are being managed sustainably.

There is a real need to promote sustainable forest management certification systems, so that consumers can be confident that the forest products they buy are both legal and sustainably sourced. APEC EGILAT might consider addressing these challenges as well.

It could also consider monitoring the progress towards more responsible forestry and trade in the region. It is hard to make informed decisions and to monitor progress without access to credible and current data. An important gap that exists when it comes to promoting trade in responsible wood products is regular, systematic information about changes in management practices in response to strengthened policy and market signals.

APEC is a good forum for economies all along the timber supply chain — from producer, to processor, to consumer — to come together and share information about the new laws and regulations designed to prevent both imports and exports of illegal timber.

APEC EGILAT can take advantage of its diversity of national circumstances and experiences putting in place national timber legality verification systems by making the lessons from these experiences available to all member economies.

APEC EGILAT meeting in Jakarta was a very welcome event and we look forward to seeing EGILAT play a proactive role in addressing these remaining challenges going forward.

Andrew Ingles is chief technical adviser on Asia Pacific forest program for The Nature Conservancy in Australia and Wahjudi Wardojo is senior advisor on international forest carbon policy for The Nature Conservancy in Indonesia.