The WWF says that EU countries are not doing enough to implement new anti-illegal timber regulation and introduce sustainable and legal government procurement policies.
The green NGO has completed its latest environmental ‘barometer’ survey, looking at steps all 27 EU states have taken to put in place Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) legislation and to implement the anti-illegal wood EU Timber Regulation, which comes into force in March 2013. It also focused on green procurement policies at central and local government level.
From the survey findings, the WWF awarded countries points out of 18. Top with 12 were the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands – and the UK was picked out as the “most consistent high scorer” in the ‘barometer’ studies over the years, albeit now one of the “slowest in terms of [further] improving performance”. Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain and Slovakia came bottom with two points or less.
The WWF said that only four states had put legislation in place to enable them to receive timber from tropical countries which have signed FLEGT Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA). The latter give the supplier countries preferential access to the EU for VPA-licensed timber in exchange for undertaking to introduce sustainable forest management .
Nine EU countries, said the green group, have not introduced any implementing measures for the upcoming EUTR and only seven were making ‘good progress’ towards ensuring all government bodies procured only legal and sustainable timber. Eleven countries had no policy on this at all.
WWF UK head of forest trade and policy Beatrix Richards said that EU governments needed to do more to combat the illegal timber trade and that they had a “busy year ahead” to put the measures in place to implement the EUTR and FLEGT legislation.
