Building on Forest Governance Reforms through FLEGT: The Best Way of Controlling Forests' Contribution to Climate Change?

• Published date: 01 July 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9388.2011.00717.x
• Date: 01 July 2011
• Author: Kate Dooley,Saskia Ozinga

Building on Forest Governance Reforms through

FLEGT: The Best Way of Controlling Forests’

Contribution to Climate Change?

Kate Dooley and Saskia Ozinga

Illegal logging is a major problem in the forestry

sector, and legislation to combat it has recently been

introduced in both the United States and the European

Union (EU) – two of the world’s largest importers of

timber. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and

the timber industry have urged governments to use

trade incentives to control illegalities, and this has

been instrumental in the development of these laws.

The Lacey Act, an American conservation law revised

in 2008 to include illegal timber, requires businesses

to demonstrate that their purchasing policies and

mechanisms effectively avoid sourcing timber from

illegal sources. Because tackling the problem depends

on cooperation between importing and exporting

countries, the EU has been working since 2002 on a

comprehensive plan to control illegal timber imports:

the EU Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Gov-

ernance and Trade (FLEGT). This Action Plan has led

to new legislation to control illegal timber imports and

help timber-producing countries to improve forest

governance. It is hoped that in this way FLEGT will

also contribute to keeping forests standing, thereby

mitigating climate change. However, it is feared that

World Bank and United Nations initiatives on Reduced

Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation

(REDD) may undermine the FLEGT initiative if they

do not recognize the need to begin with forest gover-

nance reforms.

INTRODUCTION

Illegal logging is a major problem worldwide, causing

enormous damage to forests, forest peoples and the

economies of producer countries. There are no exact

figures, but a large percentage of tropical-timber

imports into the European Union (EU) are believed to

be illegally sourced. The World Bank estimates that the

illegal timber trade may comprise over a tenth of a total

global timber trade worth more than US$150 billion a

year.1Concern about the extent of illegal logging around

the world has grown significantly in past years, leading

to new legislation in the EU and the United States. This

concern has arisen from a variety of factors: growing

evidence of the link between forest destruction and the

loss of government revenues, the increasing emphasis

on ‘good governance’ in international policy, and

growing recognition of the role that consumer countries

play in fuelling demand for illegal products. This has led

to the development of the EU’s Action Plan for Forest

Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT).

There is also greater awareness of the link between

what happens to the world’s forests and the issue of

climate change. Forests can play an important part in

mitigating climate change, but forest loss contributes to

12–17% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions.2

This has led to the initiative on Reducing Emissions

from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD),

spearheaded by the World Bank, among others. The

basic concept behind REDD is simple: governments,

companies or forest owners in tropical forest countries

should be rewarded for keeping their forests instead of

cutting them down.

For the EU FLEGT and REDD initiatives to be success-

ful, two key issues need to be addressed: clarification of

who holds the rights to forest land; and improving

forest governance. This is well recognized in the FLEGT

process. However, recognition of the importance of

these issues is advancing only slowly in connection with

REDD. There is an urgent need for REDD to build on

the FLEGT model for addressing forest governance if

both of these initiatives are to have a positive impact on

solving the forest crisis.

THE PROBLEM OF ILLEGAL

LOGGING: ON WHAT SCALE?

Although exact figures are impossible to obtain, given

the illegal nature of the activity, reliable estimates

1Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),

OECD Environmental Outlook (OECD, 2001), at 122.

2G.R. Van der Werf et al., ‘CO2 Emissions from Forest Loss’, 2

Nature Geoscience (2009), 737.

Review of European Community & International Environmental Law

RECIEL 20 (2) 2011. ISSN 0962 8797

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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