Anthropologists involved in the project to achieve FSC certification in a huge CIB forestry concession in West Africa risked losing their shirts in the process – literally.
Their job was to get the indigenous pygmy population, who live entirely in the forest, to engage with the process. They do not share our concept of property and the various groups in the region seldom communicated with each other, let alone the outside world. One thing westerners who visited them soon learned was to have just one of any object as the locals had no idea why you needed two of anything, including shirts, and felt free to take the “spare”.
Despite the challenges, however, the local population were successfully involved. A radio station was set up so they could communicate concerns (with wind-up wirelesses distributed throughout the area) and satellite-linked hand-held computers with icon key pads were developed to enable people to highlight the importance to their livelihood of different parts of the forest.
All in all, the Kabo project was a colossal achievement. But, as our special feature on timber and the environment this week underlines, it is just one of many examples of the international industry going the extra mile to ensure it is dealing in a truly renewable material from well-managed sources.
The UK Timber Trade Federation is involved in a raft of initiatives to “develop the environmental credentials of timber”, from the Responsible Purchasing Policy, to timber trade action plans with supplier countries and the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade programme.
And while nobody pretends there aren’t still some bad apples out there, other individual companies, like CIB (part of the DLH Group), are also making huge efforts at considerable cost to continue to improve environmental performance. They make tremendous stories for the industry to broadcast to the wider world, particularly following the publication of the UK’s Olympic Delivery Authority’s “sustainability strategy”, and we should shout them from the treetops.
