Policy recommendations

  • The European Commission should adopt legislation which requires that only legally-harvested timber and timber products coming from legal sources and responsibly-managed forests be placed on the European market. Legislation should be cost-effective, fair and enforceable and should include sanctions. The primary responsibility for proving legality should rest with all companies that are importing or selling products in the EU, thus creating a level playing field and being WTO-compatible.
  • The European Commission should strengthen the FLEGT-process of supporting wood producing countries to improve forest law enforcement, tackle corruption and promote socially and environmentally responsible forest management.
  • The EU should enlarge the number of Voluntary Partnership Agreements with producing countries. A participatory multi-stakeholder process, including local communities and indigenous peoples, should be at the core of these VPAs.
  • The EU should broaden the range of products covered by VPAs to cover all timber products. 
  • The EU Member States should speed up the implementation of sustainable public procurement for wood products including social and environmental criteria. 
  • The European Commission should endeavour to bring best practices in EU countries together and give clear guidance to Member States on how they can implement sustainable procurement by developing guidelines and tools to include social and environmental criteria in public procurement.

Case: Illegal Logging

28-10-2009 Green concerns on logging and climate change

MEP Raul Romeva I Rueda (Verts/ALE) quotes a Greenpeace reports that states that the EU is in favour of financing the timber industry through its donations as a mechanism for climate change mitigation.

By approving documents that use the term Sustainable Forest Management, which takes industrial logging for granted, instead of definitions that more specifically focus on conservation of forests by local communities. Romeva I Rueda emphasises that this EU position could increase forest degradation, running counter to the true priority of halting tropical deforestation and the global efforts to combat climate change.

For monitoring and raising this issue we have monitored Raul Romeva I Rueda as Fair Politician.

Monitor fair: Greens/EFA

 

Parliamentary questions
28 October 2009
E-5310/09
WRITTEN QUESTION by Raül Romeva i Rueda (Verts/ALE) to the Commission

Subject: EU's position on industrial logging as a means of combating climate change

Following the negotiations at the UN preparatory meeting for the Copenhagen climate change conference that took place this week in Bangkok, Thailand, Greenpeace is reporting that the EU is in favour of financing the timber industry through its donations as a mechanism for climate change mitigation.
According to Greenpeace experts, the documents approved as part of the international agreements on climate change reached in Bali in 2007 and Poznan in 2008 refer to the approach that should be taken to forests in the future REDD mechanism (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). The term sustainable management of forests is used with a broad definition that includes topics such as the use and conservation of forests by local communities, an activity that does not necessarily involve large-scale industrial activity. Nevertheless, as Greenpeace explains, the forestry industry has since been exerting pressure to exchange this concept for a different term that is very similar but has a different meaning: Sustainable Forest Management, or SFM, a term that belongs to the language of the timber industry and that takes it for granted that forests are to be exploited on an industrial scale.
According to the same experts, the large areas of intact forest that still remain on the planet the primary forests continue to store carbon, and it is therefore vital that their degradation and deforestation be curbed in order to curb climate change. It is calculated that, worldwide, deforestation accounts for almost 20 % of greenhouse gases.
In view of the above information, can the Commission state its position on this topic? Does the Commission not believe that the new wording would lead to a situation where the EU would be implicitly supporting forest degradation, which would run counter to the true priority of halting tropical deforestation? Is the Commission aware that giving the go-ahead to industrial logging is undermining global efforts to combat climate change, and indeed helping to speed it up?