mainly in recent years by concessionaires exceeding their le- gal cuts or concession areas, and through forgery and re-use of actual permits. Some also takes place by giving conces- sions for example for palm oil, where logging takes place in and around the plantations to help finance the first years, especially when near protected areas, or by cutting along “road” corridors more widely than required for road purpos- es, again covering up the actual logging intent. One example of this was observed directly by one UNEP field team in 2009 in the northern part of the Leuser Ecosystem, not far from the well-known Bukit Lawang tourist site. There, protests by a local mayor against the illegal logging, resulted in the same mayor receiving shortly thereafter a photo of himself with a price tag on his head.
Similar forgery or reuse of permits also relates to the sale, trans- port and re-sale during transport of wood exports, where the ac- tual amounts cut and exported far exceed official numbers (Nel- leman et al. 2007, 2010). It is also fairly easy to corrupt and bribe officials as the law enforcement system is often fragmented or discontinued, and with limited or no transboundary collabora- tion, restricted only to specific operations with important, but unfortunately often short-lived effects. At the same time, the INTERPOL National Central Bureaus and responsible national agencies in each country rarely, if ever, have specific training or knowledge or assigned staff to work on the issue of organized illegal logging, and most often lack the training and resources to work effectively with the rangers out in the regions. These
national agencies have clear restrictions on operating outside of their countries, hence, without an international consortium through INTERPOL, the syndicates can continue freely.
Another major problem is the fact that as law enforcement is stepped up in one area, the syndicates merely shift area, meth- od or tune down operations, or even halt them entirely in one area until it is considered safe to restart operations. This is one of the reasons for increased intrusion into protected areas, why Sumatra is running out of high-value timber, and a reason for increases in illegal logging elsewhere including since the mid 2000s in Central Africa, Kalimantan and Papua New Guinea (Nelleman et al. 2010).
There is widespread consensus that a broad, multi-scale but well coordinated approach is required to reduce organized crime in the logging sector. The political framework, interna- tional agreements, INTERPOL and several UN agencies, down to police forces, environmental enforcement agencies, rangers, training programmes and ranger schools at the lowest level are already in place. However, the agencies are not coordinated, scaled and targeted to combat illegal logging as a transnation- al system, making it relatively easy for criminal syndicates to shift operators, carriers, subsidiary companies or geographic locations for extraction and transport, or to bribe officials at different levels. Hence, unless addressed directly as a transna- tional problem, the illegal logging will continue to flourish, with severe costs also to emissions reduction schemes.