Accompanying the GTTN Working Group Meetings in Washington D.C. this fall, Gesche Schifferdecker – communications manager for GTTN and the European Forest Institute, interviewed Charles ‘Chip’ Barber, Director of the Forest Legality Initiative at World Resources Institute (WRI).
Illegal logging is the first issue that comes up when concerned with deforestation and forest degradation, so Barber. So the first task to achieve sustainability in forest management and trade is to make it fairly legal. GTTN provides a great opportunity to do so and is a perfect fit for the WRI, according to Barber. GTTN is, like the WRI, a catalyst for new partnerships for concrete tasks. As the demand for product information increases in terms of origin and manufacture, timber tracking and identification becomes more important. GTTN together with its partners addresses the many challenges of timber identification and makes tracking more tangible.
How Barber got interested in timber tracking and more about the WRI’s stand on GTTN can be found in the interview.
