European Union (EU)

Over the past twenty years non-governmental organisations have shown increasing interest in setting standards with an overt agenda for social or environmental change.

I was one among the many sleep-deprived observers present at the birth of the Kyoto Protocol, during the early hours of a cold December morning in 1997. I cannot claim to have formed an immediate emotional attachment. Along with many others, I despaired already at the weakling’s lack of ambition, and numerous defects (politely called loopholes) that rendered it a joke on the planet. It was optimistically proclaimed a “first small step”, implying that better would follow once the world “warmed up” to the idea of living in a carbon-constrained world.

The European Union is closing its doors to illegal timber exports. But unless we tackle unsustainable logging to satisfy domestic timber markets, their actions will little benefit forests, or the millions of poor people that live within them. Making timber sustainable requires the use of both trade and climate strategies in unison to bring about locally controlled forestry.