Forest detectives are tackling the illegal wood trade | FT Rethink

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A global fraud, largely hidden from view, is destroying critical forests.

We are facing a huge crisis in biodiversity.

Undermining international sanctions.

We've seen conflict timber going from Russia to a number of different countries.

And reducing Indigenous lands and livelihoods to ruin.

All of us are likely using, consuming illegal timber products.

Enforcement agencies say illegal logging is the third-most-profitable cross-border crime, after counterfeiting and drug trafficking. And the trade in the black-market timber it produces could be worth more than $150bn a year, according to Interpol. Criminals manipulate paperwork and complex supply chains to cheat border checks, certifications, and regulations.

But research institutions, industry, and government agencies are fighting back. Many of them are working with World Forest ID, a charity dedicated to battling deforestation through scientific analysis.

Being able to understand where something comes from has been the Achilles heel of so many of these regulations. For the science to be settled and for it to be turned into tools that can really be used by enforcement officials with the support that they need will be an absolute game changer.

Trees are among the largest organisms on earth. But it's the tiniest microscopic details, some highlighted here in a red stain, that can tell what a timber product is really made of.

It always amazes me that you can take a tiny little scrap of wood and have a pretty good idea of what kind of tree it came from.

An ongoing collection of around 100,000 specimens are stored at Kew, part of a global referencing project to identify protected timber, such as teak. Coveted by luxury boat builders, it's incredibly tough, but also endangered and banned from sources like Myanmar. Yet more than $20mn of Myanmar teak is thought to have been shipped into the EU since March 2022.

That's the whole point of collecting reference material with imported timbers. There's paperwork that is supposed to say what it is and where it's from. With slides like this and other techniques, we can actually confirm or refute those claims.

On a floor below, one of these other techniques can peer far deeper, identifying suspect timber products by chemical analysis.

We're essentially looking at the chemical expression of genetics. So, each species has a unique chemical fingerprint.

A jet of gas blasts away a tiny cloud of molecules, which are red, and in this case, identified as those belonging to rosewood.

It takes about ten seconds to get to species-level identification on a good day.

Subject to bans, yet still plundered towards extinction for the lucrative eastern furniture market, rosewood is considered to be the most trafficked wild species in the world. Unsustainable demand for exotic hardwoods is causing deforestation on an epic scale. But here in Europe and elsewhere, much of the recent illegal trade has been in so-called "conflict timber" from Russia and Belarus. Suppliers evade Western sanctions by mixing it into engineered products, like ply, shipped via other countries to hide their true origin.

Hi, Victor. Lovely to meet you.

Welcome, Madeleine. Come on in.

But scientists like Victor Deklerck are on the case. Based at the Meise Botanic Garden outside Brussels, his team is perfecting a database that can tell not only what a timber is, but crucially, where it came from.

We try to verify the harvest location of timber or forestry commodities, and we do that by sampling physical samples in the field, analysing them for their chemical signature, and this chemical signature is quite important, because that changes between locations, so that allows us to have an idea where something might come from.

Press hard. You rotate back to crack the core. That's how you can look at the interior of a tree without having to cut it down. You can see the different growth rings already on this one.

So, what do you do with this, now that you've taken it from the tree?

So, we would collect the point of this tree, we would give it a unique barcode, and then, afterwards, it's on to the lab and get the chemical data out of it.

Trees absorb chemistry that's unique to the environment surrounding them. World Forest ID is developing a network of research centres, like this laboratory in South Australia, able to measure concentrations of isotopes or slight variations of elements, like carbon, that change from place to place.

So, basically, from a piece of wood like this, or a sample of timber, we're able to extract the chemical profile, and then analyse the isotope ratio. You're then able to trace that back to a particular geographic region.

The process can be relatively straightforward, when there is georeferenced data to match. But where baseline forest data has not or cannot be sampled, in conflict zones, for example, AI is being harnessed to fill in the gaps and make predictions based on the existing information gathered from around 12,500 trees globally.

We will never have samples from everywhere, from every other tree in the forest.

So we have been working on machine learning models, statistical techniques that allow us to give reliable, robust answers to our end users. We can figure out, when we have a sample of unknown origin, where it might have originated from.

It's a work in progress, but in one ongoing case, isotope testing has yielded results for enforcement agencies in Belgium.

So, this is a new technique for us. We have been able to confirm for a total of 260 tonnes of timber that the timber was in breach of the European timber regulation, and that it was actually Russian wood. We have different possibilities to seize the wood. We can also issue fines against the companies, but we can also force them to take the necessary measures to avoid putting illegal timber on the European market.

260 tonnes of conflict timber may seem like a proverbial "woodchip in a forest," when you consider that, according to Interpol, sanctioned or illegally logged wood could account for up to 30 per cent of the global trade.

All of the mainstream traders of forest products have to be asking these questions and using these techniques to be sure of what they're buying, and if they're not doing that, then they're vulnerable.

But campaigners are hoping that advances in technology will lead to more effective enforcement, designed to close the loopholes which allow illegal loggers and traders to profit through the destruction of the world's shrinking forests.