If the EU market for verified sustainable tropical timber grows, it will incentivise and spread uptake of sustainable forest management in tropical countries.
That’s the premise on which the European Sustainable Tropical Timber Coalition (STTC – www.europeansttc.com) has been developed by a continent-wide public-private sector alliance. In fact, it’s done the math. It estimates that if all seven of Europe’s leading tropical timber consumers imported exclusively verified sustainable material – that’s the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands – an additional 12.5 million ha of forest would come under sustainable management. To put that in perspective, that’s just 500,000ha shy of the area of England.
Established in 2013, the STTC was the brainchild of IDH-The Sustainable Trade Initiative, a Dutch government-backed not-for-profit organisation. The organisation has been its principal funder ever since, but has drawn together a network of partners and supporters, including timber importers, end-users, retailers, trade federations, NGOs and certification bodies.
The STTC is also backed by a number of major cities, including Berlin, Rotterdam and Barcelona, with which it has worked to implement procurement policies to encourage use of sustainable tropical timber in key urban projects.
The aim is not just to grow city authorities’ tropical timber consumption, but for the applications to act as billboards to business and consumers, to counter the popular perception that using tropical timber is inevitably a driver of deforestation.
The STTC’s central message is that using sustainably-sourced tropical timber can not only help maintain forests and habitats, underpinning their climate change mitigation capacity and biodiversity, but also deliver a range of sustainable social and economic benefits for communities in supplier countries.
The STTC’s initial goal is to grow verified sustainable material’s share of the European primary tropical timber market to 50%, a level which it sees as a tipping point.
To help achieve this, it has also supported implementation of sustainable procurement policies by trade federations and backed ‘action plans’ from individual companies to grow sustainable tropical timber sales and applications.
It has taken its message to trade fairs, and communicated it via its website and the STTC News newsletter – to which you can subscribe at www.europeansttc.com.
It also runs an annual conference which invariably draws a capacity pan-European audience and has developed a reputation, not just for the topicality and interest of presentations, but also delegate participation. A good part of the day-long event is given over to ‘table talk’ discussions, where participants can ask questions and share their experience and opinions on key topics.
The next conference takes place in Berlin on November 20, the day before the International Hardwood Conference in the same city, giving participants the opportunity to attend both.
The theme is ‘Exploring pathways to verified sustainable tropical timber’. Speakers and delegates will look at promotion and marketing of sustainable tropical timber and how sustainable forest management uptake can be given added momentum by such initiatives as the EU Forest Legality Enforcement, Governance and Trade Voluntary Partnership Agreement (FLEGT VPA) legality assurance programme, and verified sourcing area projects – area-based mechanisms for accelerating production and uptake of sustainable commodities.
Over time, the STTC’s strategy has also evolved to focus increasingly on European sustainable tropical timber market monitoring and analysis. The rationale, it says, is that market development and promotional activity can only be best focused if informed by hard market data.
“Analysis of the numbers on trade flows, what products are supplied from which sources and where they do and don’t sell, is not only key to shaping policy and targeting market promotion and education initiatives, it is also vital for measuring success,” states the STTC.
Last year the organisation published a report from forest and timber sustainability analysts and advisors Probos (www.probos.nl/ en) ‘How sustainable are Europe’s Tropical Timber Imports?’ to support industry and government market development efforts. A new edition, covering 2018, undertaken by Probos with the Global Timber Forum and looking in more detail at the link between European sustainable tropical timber imports and sustainable forest management uptake, will be published soon.
First results were unveiled in the framework of a timber sector meeting in June during the same week the Amsterdam Declaration Partnership convened. The latter is a grouping of European countries pledged to 100% deforestation-free forest commodities; soy, cocoa and palm oil. The findings were that, among the lead EU tropical timber importing countries, still only 28.5% of primary tropical timber products (UK 42.5%) are verified sustainable.
Question marks
The latest report raises a big question mark over the ambition of the Amsterdam Declaration Partnership to achieve their goal in the near future given today’s levels of deforestation free commodity imports. Critically, timber is also currently not on the Partnership’s commodity list and an increasing body of opinion, including IDH, believes it should be.
The findings of another STTC survey on how companies promote tropical timber in general and certified tropical timber in particular will be presented at the Berlin Conference.
To provide impetus to the sustainable tropical timber market, the STTC website also includes a range of marketing support information and materials, with links to life cycle analysis studies, comparing timber performance in various applications versus rival materials. It also connects to the FSC’s ‘Together we are FSC’ marketing tool kit, which the STTC supported in development.
There are links too to technical information on lesser known or lesser-used sustainable tropical timber species, another key STTC focus. Greater use of these, it states, supports species composition in the forest, will reduce supply stress on the more ‘mainstream varieties’ and make implementation of sustainable forest management more economically viable for suppliers.
The coalition behind European sustainable tropical timber market development also became that much stronger this year with a pledge from the STTC and the Fair & Precious (F&P) marketing/branding campaign to work more closely together.
F&P was launched by the International Tropical Timber Technical Association in 2016. It is strongly focused on the end-user and retail markets, using powerful consumerstyle marketing imagery and messaging on its website – (www.fair-and-precious.org).
Companies along the supply chain can also use the F&P brand if they sign up to 10 commitments on sustainable, socially aware sourcing. But its aim, like the STTC’s, is fundamentally to harness European tropical timber consumption to drive uptake of sustainable forest management.
The two organisations say that they share the same focus and have complementary strategies and that working together they could be stronger than the sum of their parts.
“While the STTC has undertaken research and technical work into the availability, supply, demand and performance of sustainable tropical timber, F&P is highly effective in terms of broader communications, use of visuals and branding,” said IDH programme manager Nienke Sleurink.
“Combining these capabilities – provision of technical information and communication skills and tools – will create a powerful resource for verified sustainable tropical timber in the marketplace.”
