Large scale landowners are estimated to be responsible for around half of deforestation in the Amazon, compared to 12 per cent by smallholders, but a report from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has found that since 2005, the contribution to annual deforestation by the largest landowners has fallen by 63 per cent, while that of smallholders has increased by 69 per cent. In 2013, overall deforestation increased by 28 per cent compared with the previous year. One of the authors said that part of the reason for the rise was that many conservation areas had been scaled down or had their protection status changed, and flagship public-private initiatives, such as a moratorium on trading soya beans from newly deforested areas in the Amazon, were about to end. Furthermore, a boom in infrastructure projects in the Amazon since 2009, including the building of new roads and dams, may also be contributing to Brazil’s rising deforestation rates. The report recommended schemes that would provide credit to Brazil’s 6 million small landowners living in rural areas in the Amazon and promote more efficient farming techniques among small farmers and large landowners.

China has halted commercial logging by state firms in forests in the vast north-eastern province of Heilongjiang bordering Russia, home to much of the country’s timber industry, a move experts see as a significant step to curb over-exploitation of timber. The central government has allocated 2.35bn yuan a year to cover forestry workers’ living costs between 2014 and 2020. During the last century, warfare and unrest depleted and damaged the forests. More recently, economic growth has taken a further toll. There are concerns about the long-term ecological impacts if management of the forests does not improve with the region being an important agricultural zone and concerns about deforestation disrupting rainfall patterns.

Campaigning organisation Greenpeace has spent two months placing GPS trackers on illegal loggers in the Amazon using GPS tracking technology and satellite surveillance. The operation was designed to uncover the activities and movements of illegal loggers near Santarém, the centre of the logging industry in the Amazon. The investigation found that the timber is transported by trucks on highways at night to evade the police and that fake documentation is used to launder the timber.

A 49-year-old journalist reportedly investigating illegal logging in Kratie province was shot dead early Sunday morning after he and five other journalists went to investigate reports of illegal logging. Within hours, police arrested three men – a commune police chief, a military police officer and a Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) soldier – for the murder, officials said. The murder follows two other similar cases in Cambodia from 2012. The director of the Cambodia Institute for Media Studies, said there are many freelance reporters based in the provinces who investigate illegal activity and often work independently, which can leave them vulnerable. While some reporters in the provinces, often unsalaried, are tempted to betray their journalistic ethics and profit from the information they dig up, journalists who refuse to be bought off run the real risk of being framed – or attacked – when they uncover a crime.

The reputation of Australia's $2 billion timber export industry is in question after four Queensland workers were fined and sentenced to jail for illegally exporting timber. Three directors and an employee of a wholesale timber and flooring company in Brisbane pleaded guilty to falsifying Commonwealth documents to send timber to a number of countries between 2006 and 2009.

PEFC Italy, along with Conlegno, RiSSC, Risk Monitor and CNVP have launched a project aimed at preventing criminal organizations infiltrating into the EU timber market. The TREES project (Timber Regulation Enforcement to protect European wood Sector from criminal infiltration) aims at promoting standard procedures to prevent the risks of criminal infiltrations into the European market. By the end of the project, a standardized set of guidelines, actions and strategies to overcome difficulties in Due Diligence implementation will be developed, providing market operators with suggestions on how to carry out risk assessments and risk procedures.

British businesses from the high street and timber, construction, publishing, DIY and grocery industries are among the first UK firms committing to responsible forest trade to help end deforestation around the world with a shift to 100 per cent sustainable timber and wood products by 2020. The existing loopholes in the current legislation to combat illegal timber means some industries are exempt from ensuring that their wood or products have come from legal sources. In 2015 the timber regulation is due to be reviewed and WWF and its campaign supporters are calling on the UK government to demand the EU makes the necessary improvements to the regulation to ensure that all timber products are covered and thus end the import of illegal wood.

Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), a long-time target of environmental campaigners, committed in February 2013 to protect and restore a million hectares of forest across Indonesia under its Forest Conservation Policy. This video presented by Tony Juniper, an advisor to APP, highlights key aspects of the policy. The policy requires its suppliers to not only protect natural forest resources, but also biodiversity and human rights. APP has worked with The Forest Trust (TFT) to help develop and implement the policy. And the company has adopted the High Conservation Value (HCV) assessment, developed by the Forest Stewardship Council, to ensure the values of natural forest are fully understood. APP is also adopting High Carbon Stock (HCS) survey to understand the location of big stocks of carbon. The restoration commitment of APP targets nine “landscape” across Sumatra and Kalimantan, regions where the company sources its fibre.

Liberia is to become the first African nation to stop cutting down trees in return for development aid. Liberia is the home to a significant part of West Africa’s remaining forest, with about 43% of the Upper Guinean forest, and it is also a global diversity hotspot, home to the last remaining viable populations of species. Illegal logging in Liberia stared from 2003 after the civil war ended, and some researchers have connected the outbreak of Ebola with the widespread deforestation, which brings people into contact with natural reservoir of the virus. Now Norway has reached agreement with Liberia government that Norway will help Liberia to build up the capacity to monitor and police the forests. With widespread corruption and a government struggling to impost its authority, it should be recognized that stopping all the logging in Liberia will not be easy.

A new report, titled Disrupting the Global Commodity Business, published by the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) argues that a global transition could enable the world to produce more food, fuel and fibre without destroying more forests. Chris Elliot, the Executive Director of CLUA, writes: “we must not only shift commodity production away from native forests, but also protect these forests by increasing recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples and rural communities to manage them”. The report also highlights the role that activism has played in disrupting business-as-usual approaches to commodity production. However, it emphasizes that lasting change will come in moving from “disruption” to “transformation” of how commodities are produced. To the end, the report focuses on two key areas – supply chain management and commodity governance, illustrating the ingredients needed to fundamentally shift big business toward less damaging practices while at the same time supporting local communities.

Five of the world’s largest palm oil producers have announced an immediate moratorium on palm oil sourced via clearance of potential high carbon stock forests. A year-long study aims to establish a threshold for defining what constitutes high carbon stock (HCS) forest. The move comes after intense campaigning by environmentalists pushed dozens of major palm oil buyers to establish zero deforestation sourcing policies for palm oil, which is one of the top drivers of forest conversion in Malaysia and Indonesia. The moratorium may provide a temporary reprieve from green groups, which have portrayed the five companies – dubbed the Sustainable Palm Oil Manifesto Group for the name of their sustainability initiative – as laggards in the sector for continuing to chop down forests.

A tree-by-tree battle between activists and timber workers more than three decades in Tasmania tore apart the Apple Isle. Finally, a historic peace deal came in 2012. Hodgman’s government removed 400,000 hectares of native forest from reserves, designing it “future potential production forest land” – available to be logged in six years’ time. The Hodgman government is also putting anti-protest laws aimed squarely at the environment movement. Plantations in Africa, south-east Asia and South America had come online and flooded the solid wood and woodchip markets with cheap, plentiful supply. Tasmania’s major green groups are plotting their next steps. The Hodgman government has created a ministerial council to advise on the future of the state’s forestry industry, without any environmentalist invited. The Hodgman government’s pro-logging drive makes the negotiations between environmentalists and the industry impossible.

A new report by Forest Trends, a US based NGO, found out that around five football fields of tropical forest have been illegally cleared every minute between 2000 and 2012, which losses have been driven by consumer demand for beef, leather and timber in Europe and US. The values of this trade in commodities including timber, leather, beef, soy and palm oil, accounting for $61bn a year. The majority of the illegal deforestation for commercial agriculture has been in Brazil and Indonesia. The local governments are lack of capacity to enforce laws to against illegal logging. Report found that licences and permits to cut the trees are often acquired through corruption. Authors believe that consumer countries in EU could have done more to tackle the problem. Strong regulations rather than voluntary actions is the better solution. The biggest concern for campaigners now is the spread of illegal deforestation to new countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

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.