In the framework of the Forest Legality Week and kindly hosted by the World Resources Institute, GTTN held its first working groups meeting on 19-20 Oct, 2017. On the second day of this event, three parallel workshops took place to discuss and to evolve strategies for the GTTN working groups.
WG1 participants, most of them being timber tracking experts, discussed improvements of the methods and their international acceptance by developing process guidelines and strategies to combine methods enabling support to the diversity of taxon and origin identification requests.
The best way sampling, analysis or data interpretation can be done depends on many factors such as the timber tracking method used, the specific question asked and the purpose (evidence in court or due diligence). During the workshop, the common ground of these different approaches was discussed to find out how international guidelines could allow merging of data and combination of methods and hence foster maximal impact.
The workshop report including a draft task list for WG1 has now been sent to all WG1 members (as many could unfortunately not be present in Washington) for amendments and pre-registration to the proposed task forces. The researchers active in WG1, currently representing 29 countries from all continents (whereas members of the entire GTTN network come from 39 countries), will hence be joining forces in a concrete set of tasks they will finalise by the start of 2018 to work on their common goals taking global action against illegal logging and the associated timber trade. More info on WG1 and their activities will be posted here.
Contact person: Nele Schmitz, Thünen Institute
