An independent study by The Forest Trust and Ata Marie have found that APP has sufficient plantation resources to supply a massive new mill being built in OKI, South Sumatra. The study did however uncover one minor gap in supply in 2020. Aida Greenbury, APP’s managing director of sustainability said “The TFT report forecasts a minor gap in supply in 2020. However it is clear that with a harvesting rotation of around five years, improvements made now can bridge that gap by increasing productivity of supplier plantations through improved yield, better tree stock and reduction of waste. As such, we have been developing an action plan to ensure we have sufficient plantation fibre to meet the pulp requirements of our existing mills as well as our future mill in South Sumatra, in line with our target to become a 100% plantation business for pulp production.

According to a paper entitled ‘these are the days of lasers in the jungle’ published in Carbon Balance and Management, assessing global forest carbon stocks using a fleet of aeroplanes fitted with advanced LiDAR could be done for a fraction of the cost of a typical Earth observation satellite mission. The authors argue that it could be possible to assess the carbon stock of every single square hectare of tropical forest on Earth within this decade using this modern sampling method.

According to the 2012 World Bank report, an estimated 80% of Peruvian timber export comes from illegal logging. Despite the fact that the law requires loggers to show where the timber has come from, the activity of illegal logging is still rife here for many reasons. Authorities rarely patrol the remote and inaccessible areas where the activity occurs, and, as explained in this article, many officers are happy to accept bribes to turn a blind eye.

Sir Jonathon Porritt, a leading environmentalist and adviser to the Prince of Wales, has suggested that poor countries should be allowed to chop down half of their forests as long as the agreed to the preservation of those containing the greatest volume of carbon. As chairman of the palm oil industry-funded High Carbon Stock Study, Sir Jonathon’s suggestion comes in response to trying to determine which forests contain the most carbon and should therefore be protected because clearing would result in massive greenhouse gas emissions. Sir Jonathon told the Times “It’s trade-off time. You can’t develop a new palm oil business in West Africa if you don’t cut down a tree. So the real story now is what kind of deforestation is acceptable within an understanding of the need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases but secure real economic benefits for people in poor countries.” The following article by the Guardian Why zero deforestation is compatible with a reduction in poverty (8th September) explores the difficult choices that companies and countries have to make around the complex question of sustainability.

The Tasmanian government has terminated a four-year forestry peace deal to allow widespread logging in the protected 400,000 hectare area in six years’ time. The Liberal state government claims that the protection of such a large area of forest has hindered job creation. Will Hodgman, Tasmania’s premier said “For more than 30 years, environmentalists have progressively locked up hectare after hectare of productive forests, destroying businesses and jobs, regional communities and livelihoods. We took a clear plan to the election to say ‘enough is enough’ and rip up the job-destroying forest deal.” Environmentalists argue that the state’s native forests are far more valuable left standing. Tasmania’s tourism industry employs around 15% of the state’s workforce, compared to around 1% of people employed in the forestry sector.

WWF is urging the European Commission to use the results of the recent surveys on implementation of the EU Timber Regulations to put more pressure on national governments and take legal action against non-compliant countries. WWF’s EU Government barometer shows that only 11 EU countries have so far adopted national legislation and procedures considered robust enough to control the legality of timber and timber products, thus leaving 17 without robust legislation. The most recent EU survey on implementation highlights Hungary, Poland, Spain, Malta, France, Greece and Italy as being among the countries failing to fully implement the regulations.

The founder of the independent news site dedicated to rainforests points to a slowing deforestation rate in Brazil, new initiatives extending our capacity to monitor forests and zero deforestation commitments from the private sector as reasons for optimism. He thinks that most consumers aren’t aware of the issues to the extent it affects their purchasing decisions, except in particularly egregious cases. And he says that NGO campaigns targeted at brands are effective in that these brands are more likely to change their policies quickly than governments and consequently the brands will push governments to reward their commitments by forcing the laggards to catch up.

Recognising the severe impact illegal logging is having on tax revenue generation, the Lao government has launched a pilot program to track the source of timber from sawmills and wood-processing plants. Demand for the valuable hongmu (redwood) timber from neighbouring China is thought to be driving illegal logging in the country. The pilot program requires all logs in sawmills and wood-processing plants to be inspected before export and to lay a framework for documentation that they are derived from legal sources, according to the reports.

Kenya has recently seized a shipment of $13 million worth of rosewood illegally harvested in Madagascar and bound for Hong Kong. The writer highlights the trend of illegal shipments through Hong Kong and notes that as neither Hong Kong nor China has laws banning illegal timber, border authorities cannot intercept it unless it is CITES-listed. According to estimates only 16 per cent of China’s processed timber is then exported, so there is a huge domestic market that is not subject to regulations preventing the use of illegally-harvested timber.

The start-up Rainforest Connection (RFCx) has announced a partnership with a Brazilian NGO to bring its alert system to the forest homeland of the Tembé people. Rainforest Connection's system is built using a network of recycled Android smartphones, which are modified to detect specific sounds, including the audio signatures to chainsaws, gunshots, and vehicles. When the system registers one of these sounds, it sends a signal – in real-time – to local authorities, who can then potentially take action to stop illegal logging or poaching as it happens. Each RFCx device can monitor roughly three square kilometers of forest. The project has received celebrity endorsement from musician Neil Young.

According to a recently published report in the Nature Climate Change magazine, Indonesia’s deforestation rate doubled that of Brazil in 2012, and since the Millennium it has lost forested land equivalent to one-third the size of mainland Spain. The report found that the 2011 moratorium on deforestation from intact forests actually led to vast quantities of deforestation in unprotected forests. The report has received the support of the new Indonesia President, Joko Widodo.

Cambodia has the 5th fastest rate of deforestation in the world. By law, the government have to put any wood that is seized from illegal logging activity up for auction with the proceeds deposited in the state treasury. However these auctions are not transparent, and corruption is rife. Illegal wood is often sold to government officials at cheaper than market prices, which actually promotes further illegal logging activity. The investigative report highlights cases of corruption and the attempts to stop the trade of illegally sourced wood by NGOs.

The American Forest and Paper Association has released its 2014 Sustainability Report, exhibiting the substantial and measureable progress that US pulp, paper, packaging and wood products have made towards achieving sustainability goals. The report outlines how paper mills self-generate most of their energy needs, and most of that energy is renewable and that the forest products industry is the second largest producer of combined heat and power electricity in the manufacturing sector.

The Indonesian Government is considering the viability of creating a voluntary partnership agreement (VPA) on timber trade with Australia to boost exports of forestry products. The VPA with Australia would be similar to the VPA between Indonesia and Europe: Under the EU-Indonesia VPA, all timber and timber products certified by the domestic timber legality verification system (SVLK) are considered legally harvested and in compliance with the EU’s timber regulation.

Asia Pulp and Paper have signed an agreement to end natural forest logging. Suppliers of the Indonesian based company will be bound to log solely plantation timber and not use timber with high conservation value or from peat swamps. AP&P have received widespread lobbying from Greenpeace and WWF to change their timber sourcing policies. However, it is understood the company’s real fear was that paper mills in Japan were beginning to ask questions about responsibly sourced timber.

A recent study in Nature Climate Change suggests that the rate of Deforestation in Indonesia is twice what is reported by the Government and that the Government’s 2011 regulations to combat deforestation have been largely ineffective. The report cites a Science report on the disparity between deforestation rates reported by the Indonesian government and the rate of deforestation calculated from satellite data. Green groups lobbying against palm oil deforestation and tropical forest loss claim the findings strengthen the argument that the Indonesian Government’s anti-deforestation legislation needs strengthening.

A new study, which claims to be the most comprehensive yet, suggests that nearly twice as much primary forest is being cut down in Indonesia as in Brazil, the historical global leader, despite Brazil’s forest area being roughly four times the size of Indonesia’s. According to the government's former head of forestry data gathering nearly 1m extra hectares of primary forest may have been felled in the last 12 years than was recorded officially.

A new paper by Chatham House and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has found that timber harvested illegally in Africa, Asia and Latin America continues to be sold on world markets, despite international efforts to curb the trade. Experts say that the EUTR and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) are complementary. However, there is a lack of coordination between the agencies involved in enforcing the rules of the two systems. One of the biggest loopholes identified is that both CITES- and FLEGT-licenced timber is exempt from the due diligence requirements under the EUTR, so fraudulent paperwork could escape scrutiny.

Rainforest Connection, a non-profit based in San Francisco, plans to install used Android smartphones in rainforests to help curtail illegal logging. The phones have been configured to trigger an alert for noises that match the sound signature of a chainsaw within an area of about a third of a square mile. The organisation claims this can be done at minimal cost – for example, in Indonesia unlimited data for one phone costs just $2.89 per month – and the phones can be powered using solar energy. The venture is seeking funding through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

A recently published paper in the journal Science assesses how Brazil managed to reduce its deforestation rates by 70% over the course of a decade and points to a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked, if fitfully and only after several false starts. While the Brazilian Forest Code from the mid-1990s mandated that 80% of farm land had to be set aside as a forest reserve, deforestation rates reached their highest as the code was not enforced. However, from 2005 Brazil’s President Lula da Silva made halting deforestation a priority which led to better cooperation between enforcement agencies and public prosecutors. At the same time, improvements in the efficiency of cattle breeding, a fall in export earnings from soybeans and an NGO campaign to boycott Brazilian soybeans caused deforestation to plummet. Then in 2009, once soybean expansion resumed, the government focused its efforts on the counties with the worst deforestation rates and banned them from getting cheap credit until the rates fell. Other reinforcing factors included a proper land registry, a cattle boycott, an amnesty for illegal clearances before 2008 and money from a special $1 billion Amazon Fund financed by foreign aid.