Forests Investments

Timber Regulation Enforcement Exchange

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome

Since 2012, Forest Trends and Chatham House have been working with officials from EU Member States and US Lacey enforcement agencies, to further understanding of complex high-risk supply chains for wood products and support coordinated implementation of the EU Timber Regulation and US Lacey Act. These two workstreams have merged into a process called the Timber Regulation Enforcement Exchange (TREE), an ongoing series of networking and information-sharing meetings, which bring the growing group of officials together every six months.

The TREE process aims to support robust and consistent enforcement of demand-side timber regulations by providing a forum for officials to gain detailed insight into high- and low-risk timber flows entering their countries, discuss practical enforcement issues with each other and relevant experts from the forest sector and other relevant product/environmental sectors, establish emergent norms for Due Diligence/care in relation to different forest products, and build relationships with producer country governments, industry representatives, and other stakeholders involved in combating illegal logging and promoting global markets for legal timber.