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.

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 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 ensure long-term forest maintenance and growth.

“Countries putting those reforms in place should be rewarded with enhanced trade benefits, which would attract investment to industries and supply chains which depend on retaining forests as forest and constantly improving their value – notably timber production,” says the TTA.

It maintains that the groundwork for such a strategy has already been laid in a series of international Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG) conferences and in the UK/EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan, with its Voluntary Partnership Agreements (FLEGT VPAs) with tropical supplier countries and FLEGT licensing of timber exports.

“Designed specifically to stop illegal logging and its associated trade, FLEGT also provides a blueprint for legal and sustainable management of other commodity supply chains, which are currently implicated in illegal deforestation,” says the TTA.

A deficiency in the FLEGT policy framework, however, is that it is only recognised by EU countries and the UK, with FLEGT licensed products only granted preferential access to their markets.

“This gives it limited market leverage when China, Japan, the Middle East, and US are today such major consumers of tropical timber products,” says the TTA.

“What’s needed is a global solution; an over-arching international legal framework for tropical forest and forest product supply chain governance and management.”

The Accord calls for:

• Effective governance and legal compliance throughout the supply chain in timber-producing countries and within international trade to deliver positive outcomes for the future of forests

• National multi-stakeholder processes that bring together government, civil society and private sector in tropical forest countries to frame national laws and standards and ensure fairness and legitimacy, as well as credibility and enforceability

• Incentivisation of effective forest governance and responsible forest trade by offering support and encouraging foreign direct investment in added-value tropical forest industries

• International business and consumer markets to commit to sourcing tropical forest products and material only from legal sources that ensure the sustainability of those resources into the future

• Simplification and rationalisation of tropical forest legality and sustainability product standards and communication.

The TTA’s proposed new framework for the international tropical timber trade would:

• Set principles and processes by which future international trade could recognise, incentivise, and support strong governance and sustainable forestry in tropical producer countries

• Be based on and recognise each country’s own nationally determined norms and standards, underpinned by independent verification

• Define a process for these national rules-based systems to be internationally recognised as a system of defined legality and sustainability, encouraging governance support and strong global collaboration

• Encourage consumer markets to adopt policies and regulations that promote responsible trade with countries with strong forest governance and discourage trade from those which cannot demonstrate and verify good forest governance

• Incentivise countries to implement effective forest governance by giving their forest products industries preferential ‘green lane’ access to international markets and trade, backed by communications and promotion throughout the supply chain

• Recognise the importance of micro and small to medium-sized enterprises in tropical producer countries through international investment and support.

This new approach, says the TTA, will require an international secretariat to drive it, among the roles of which would be to “help direct finance for countries to enact reform”.

Finally, it calls on global leaders at and following COP26 to commit to this overhaul of tropical timber trade now.

“If we don’t act, the destruction and degradation of tropical forests will continue. But there is an alternative, and it’s set out in the Tropical Timber Accord,” it says.

“We, acting as the global business community dependent on strong governance and sustainable management of forests, call on global leaders to work with our industry and other stakeholders to take action to achieve it starting with agreement to do so at COP26.

“There is no time to lose.”