Campaign group Global Witness has published a “Forest Sector Transparency Report Card” to highlight best practice in developing countries and expose wrongdoing.
The group launched the card and an associated website www.foresttransparency.info at an illegal logging update at Chatham House in London on Wednesday.
The card, a collobarative project with campaign groups in Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia and Peru, assesses 70 transparency indicators across 15 themes ranging from – “Is there a Freedom of Information Act?” and “Are logging contracts made public?”
Report highlights show that forest sector transparency is generally poor, with very little public access to information.
Problems include insecure land and forest tenures, as well as secret mining contracts “running roughshod” over forest protection measures.
On the positive side, some elements of good practice are at work in each country and transparency is increasingly being recognised as an issue.
