Timber, numbers and definitions: a proposal for a novel quantification and qualification of illegal logging

For more than a decade now, illegal logging and related timber trade (IL) have been one of the defining topics of the global agenda on forests and the environment. Such prominence has resulted in significant innovations occurring in global, regional and national forest and trade regulations. Yet, IL remains fugitive in terms of definitions, impacted markets, and drivers. This maintains a high degree of uncertainty as to the extent of IL across different geographies as well as its impacts on and associated responsibility of stakeholders along the IL value chain. This paper i) reviews existing estimates of major legal and illegal timber trade flows and applies a transparent and replicable method for the assessment of IL, and ii) provides a novel insight on the growing extent of domestic timber markets, with case studies gathered from many tropical timber producing countries. We find that current annual estimates of international illegal exports of logs and sawn-wood reach about USD6.3 billion. Also, findings indicate that adopted regulatory definitions of IL in some countries have potential negative impacts that those regulations were set to avoid. We discuss several risks that exist in embedding domestic informal timber trade into currently used IL definitions, and argue for innovative policy instruments aimed at avoiding those risks.