A hard look at hardwood consumption

Typography
Many people enjoy using tropical hardwoods as garden furniture and parquet floors, but few consumers make the link with global warming. But the link is there, because some products are made from timber from areas like the Amazon and Southeast Asia that contain vast quantities of trees that absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, but where the overall number of trees is diminishing under pressure from unscrupulous loggers.

Many people enjoy using tropical hardwoods as garden furniture and parquet floors, but few consumers make the link with global warming.

But the link is there, because some products are made from timber from areas like the Amazon and Southeast Asia that contain vast quantities of trees that absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, but where the overall number of trees is diminishing under pressure from unscrupulous loggers.

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In recent years, many importers and retailers have started using labels on furnishings like deck chairs and other hardwood products to indicate whether forest companies that felled the timber had abided by sustainable principles. But even for green-minded consumers, prices can make environmentally correct choices difficult.

''The problem is when you can see the cheaper stuff next to the more expensive and more ecofriendly stuff,'' said Joris Van Damme, 29, a traffic management expert shopping with his family last weekend at an IKEA near Brussels. ''It's just still too easy to make a decision to buy the cheaper stuff.''

The European Union has no region-wide law preventing the import of illegally logged wood products, and there can be a wide gap in price between products made from well-managed forests and products from poorly managed forests. That soon could change.

Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner, plans to propose a regulation at the end of May that would require importers and many retailers of wood products to show how the wood was obtained and where it is being sent next in the supply and production chain. The regulation would put the onus on EU governments to stop importers and retailers buying or selling wood from illegal sources, said Barbara Helfferich, a spokeswoman for Dimas.

To stay in compliance, companies would probably be able to rely on some existing methods, like certification by the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, an international nonprofit organization that sets standards for responsible forest management, she said.

To become law, the proposal would need the approval of EU governments and the European Parliament. But the effort already has important supporters, including Jean-Louis Borloo, the French environment minister. Borloo has vowed to use the French presidency of the EU, which begins this summer and runs for six months, to support moves to push through a law to help fight illegal and unsustainable logging.

Environmentalists say stricter regulation is urgent because deforestation is responsible for about one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than from the world's transportation sector.

Environmentalists also say that Europeans who fuel demand for hardwoods have a responsibility to do more to help stop illegal logging if they are serious about tackling climate change and biodiversity loss.

Judy Rodrigues, a forest campaigner at Greenpeace International, said some countries were making progress and halting exports of illegally harvested timber before they reached purchasers abroad. But she said those agencies in countries like Brazil often lacked the resources to carry out regular inspections. ''It's down to the EU to make sure that illegally sourced timber doesn't slip through the net,'' Rodrigues said.

The Forest Stewardship Council system is the voluntary framework most heavily endorsed by environmental organizations like Greenpeace. But there are a host of industry-initiated certification programs that offer more flexible and less stringent approaches.

Rodrigues said the EU should adopt a standard that is at least as strong as private systems like FSC, and then benchmark against it all other systems that importers and retailers seek to use. She also said the EU should consider making fines mandatory for wrongdoers.

Some of the operators that could be hit hardest by the legislation are Dutch companies selling floor and doors made of merbau, a tropical hardwood from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. According to a study by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth published in December, none of the 300 companies that were surveyed in the Netherlands could prove that the merbau they used was legally logged and produced in a sustainable manner.

Katarina Maaskant, the manager for EU affairs for IKEA, which is the world's largest home furnishings retailer, said the company broadly supported legislation because it would reward companies that use environmentally sound wood - and put less scrupulous operators at a disadvantage. IKEA seeks to make 30 percent of the wood material it uses comply with the equivalent of FSC standards by the end of next year.

But Maaskant said European officials should take a cautious approach in setting the standard. She urged the EU to create a workable, cost-efficient and simple system partly to ensure that important companies like IKEA are able to source sufficient quantities of wood.

''With a growing business,'' she said, ''we have to ensure we have enough volume.''