40 | Sector Focus: Tropical Timber
SUMMARY
■The Tropical Timber Accord was presented at COP26
■The chief architect of the TTA is the Timber Trade Federation
■Its ambition is to establish a new international tropical timber trading and market framework
GOVERNANCE NOW STRENGTHEN
The Timber Trade Federation unveiled a new deal at the UN Climate Change Conference to incentivise the sustainable and legal tropical timber trade through preferential international market access.Mike Jeffree reports
By the time this edition hits the press, world leaders will know all about the new Tropical Timber Accord (TTA) and its objective to strengthen governance in the international tropical timber trade. The TTA’s prime architect, the Timber Trade Federation (TTF), had four slots to present it to the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. What is more, these were in the Conference ‘Blue Zone’, the forum where policy makers hold key discussions and make key decisions. It’s where everyone wants to promote their projects and initiatives. The TTA took time to come to fruition and involved the TTF in deliberation with fellow trade organisations and government agencies worldwide, in both tropical timber supplier and consumer countries. These included such dominant, market-shaping importers as China, the US and Japan.
Above: David Hopkins launched the Tropical Timber Accord in the COP26 Blue Zone
The core premise of the TTA is that we are now at an absolutely critical juncture for maintaining the tropical forest and its vital role in supporting global biodiversity, carbon storage and climate regulation. It is key to combating climate change, but vast areas are still being destroyed and degraded every year thanks to illegal logging and largely illegal conversion of forest land to plantations, agriculture and for development. The ambition of the TTA is to establish a new international tropical timber trading and market framework. It proposes that supplier countries implement timber legality and sustainability assurance systems, underpinned by chain of custody and subject to independent audit and monitoring. Consequently they would be rewarded with
TTJ | November/December 2021 |
www.ttjonline.com
preferential access to consumer markets globally.
This contention is that this would curb illegal logging and timber trading and, in boosting the international market for legal and sustainable tropical timber, incentivise uptake of sustainable forest management in tropical countries and help disincentivise forest land conversion to other uses. The TTA doesn’t pull its punches. “Tropical forests are in danger as never before and so far strategies to halt their loss and degradation have had limited impact,” its opening sentence states. “Policies on tropical forest preservation have been included in several international treaties on climate change, but these approaches have fundamentally failed. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 – which required countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many pledging to do this through increasing tree cover or protecting existing forests – deforestation has continued. For the first time in human history, global forest cover has fallen below four billion hectares, and around 12% of global greenhouse emissions from human activity are the result of tropical deforestation and forest degradation.”
It says that even forest maintenance and development policies such as UN REDD and REDD+ are undermined because, “without strong governance mechanisms in place, there is no guarantee of permanence in the forest or landscape investments they make”. What is needed are new policies that incentivise legal and governance reform to
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