Forest Trends in the News

Despite sanctions imposed following the February 2021 coup, Myanmar exported more than $190 million worth of timber, including to countries that have sanctions on the country’s state-controlled timber monopoly, according to a new report from Forest Trends.

As a decade-long effort by the private sector to voluntarily eliminate deforestation from commodity supply chains stalls, the EU, UK, and US are all considering legality-based trade regulations. Forest Trends’ Michael Wolosin offers analysis on why both are necessary, from different stakeholders.

Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, backs start-up that seeks to offset carbon by facilitating the ability of companies to pay land-owners to keep their trees and forests alive.

The Director of Ecosystem Marketplace, Stephen Donofrio, is interviewed by SPGlobal, where he explains that there has been a dramatic surge in carbon credit sales and widening price spreads seen in 2021 are likely to continue in 2022.

The volume of sugar illegally imported into Vietnam from Cambodia and Laos has been increasing, with 757,000 metric tons per year in the 2015-19 period, nearly 2.8 times the quantity in the 2008-14 period, according to a report which was released at a seminar co-organized by Forest Trends.

Despite new regulations to clean up Vietnam’s timber sector, importers continue to bring large volumes of tropical hardwood into the country from deforestation hotspots in Africa and Asia for use in products sold domestically.

Despite sanctions by the US, EU and UK, state-owned timber company Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE) is still able to export significant volumes of wood products, according to Forest Trends, a Washington DC-based conservation group.

Carbon trading is the process of companies and traders trading permits and credits, allowing users to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. This has seen a significant increase over the last few years, as governments all over the world attempt to employ it as a means of eventually reducing emissions and managing climate change.

A new report published today from Finance for Biodiversity (F4B) points to how to break the environmentally-destructive connection between environmental crimes and legitimate investments. F4B calls on the global financial community, working with regulators and civil society organisations, to take steps to ensure the entire financing value chain is free of environmental crimes.

The voluntary carbon market (VCM) grabbed headlines in 2021 with record transactions and soaring credit prices, and observers say all signs point to an equally robust 2022. In mid-September, environmental data provider Ecosystem Marketplace sparked a frenzy when it reported the VCM was on track to hit $1 billion in annual transactions in 2021. Two […]