WRI, Agroisolab (GTTN member organisations), Kew Gardens and FSC’s Global Timber Reference Project gained some high-profile recognition recently and appeared in both the BBC and CNN.
Jenny Marc (CNN) reports with a video and an article called A library of trees could protect the forest, visiting Gabon, Agrisolab in Germany and London’s Kew Gardens.
“It is incredibly difficult to establish hard evidence that leads to prosecution”, says Alison Hoare, Chatham House, in regards to the fight against illegal logging. The video also explains that paper trail has flaws and more needs to be done to reveal faults.
Markus Boner, Agroisolab, then explains how the stable isotopes analysis can create a signature, and by establishing patterns one can group samples geographically and generate a map to estimate the location of future samples.
This obviously requires this preexisting reference data base, and that is where this ambitious project comes in. FSC certified forests allow access to the most threatened and commonly traded trees. Their teams have collected tree cores in nations at high risk of illegal logging, such as Peru, Nicaragua and the Solomon Islands.
“I think this could, hopefully, really help enforcement agencies and then just help the shift to a transparent forest sector”, says Hoare.
