Women engineers at ABB contribute to a culture of safety and…Revolutionizing the Digital Landscape: Our CEO’s Vision for Unlimited Web Hosting…The European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan, adopted in 2003, is a unique regional attempt to rein in the burgeoning global trade in illegal timber.
This is the ninth installment of Mongabay’s long-running special series, “Conservation Effectiveness.” In addition to being the only regional policy of its kind, the FLEGT Action Plan is innovative in a number of other ways. “FLEGT is unique namely in the fact that it was a policy designed to bring all relevant parties to the table to negotiate the trade agreement,” Kate Klikis, a forests campaigner with the Environmental Investigation Agency, an NGO in the U.K., told Mongabay in an email.
FLEGT has faced some serious limitations, however. Chief among them is the considerable amount of time and resources it takes to negotiate a voluntary partnership agreement and then implement a FLEGT licensing program. Even agreeing to a definition of what constitutes “legally produced timber” can be a fraught process, especially for producer countries that don’t have a robust governance structure or the resources to dedicate to the negotiation process.