Australia outlaws illegally-logged wood from abroad
Jeremy Hance mongabay.com November 21, 2012
Illegal logged tree in Indonesian Borneo. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
In another blow to illegal loggers, Australia has passed the Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill, joining the U.S. in outlawing the importation of illegal logged timber from abroad. The new legislation makes it a criminal offense for Australian businesses to import timber from illegal operations. The Australian government estimates that $400 million worth of illegal timber products are sold in the country each year often as outdoor furniture and wood for decks.
"The illegal timber trade is a trade that benefits no one. It risks jobs, it risks the timber industry, and it risks the environment," Australian Forestry Minister Joe Ludwig said in a statement.
The law was pushed by a wide coalition of businesses, environmental groups, and social and religious organizations. Retailers like IKEA, Bunnings, Simmonds Lumber, and Kimberly Clark all supported the law, while Uniting Church, World Vision, WWF, Oxfam, the Wilderness Society, and Greenpeace lobbied for it.
"[The law] criminalize[s] a trade that many Australians would already presume to be banned," Reece Turner, a forests campaigner with Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, said. "Illegal logging often involves land theft, trashing national parks and breeds corruption and human rights abuse. It's a huge challenge to countries in our region including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Cambodia."
The black market trade, which is estimated to be worth $30-$100 billion a year, is often run by mafia-like organizations involved in other criminal activities. Shining a light on illegal logging in source countries can also be incredibly dangerous as activists and journalists are frequently attacked, and even murdered, for attempting to stop illegal logging in countries like Cambodia and Brazil.
The new legislation was fiercely opposed by some logging interests, including Alan Oxley, a lobbyist who works for industrial forestry companies in Malaysia and Indonesia. Oxley, who won notoriety in 2010 .. http://news.mongabay.com/2010/1027-group_of_12_scientists_vs_oxley.html .. for misrepresenting the views .. http://news.mongabay.com/2010/1101-oxley_maathai.html .. of the late Nobel Laurette Wangari Maathai and then CIFOR director Frances Seymour as part of his campaign on behalf of plantation developers, butted heads with scientists and environmentalists over the issue.
"This bill faced stiff opposition in Australia from pro-development lobbyists," William F. Laurance, an ecologist at James Cook University and supporter of the legislation told mongabay.com. "I'm delighted to see that common sense has prevailed."
Punishments for violating the new bill in Australia include forfeiture of goods, fines up to $275,000 for a business and $55,000 for an individual, and five years in jail.
In addition to stemming illegal logging abroad, legislators say the bill will also help local businesses. Illegal loggers are able to sell their wares far cheaper than those following the law, making it difficult for Australian wood and paper businesses to compete.
The U.S. was the first country to pass illegal logging legislation with an amendment to the Lacey Act in 2008. Since then, global illegal logging has dropped 22 percent with many experts saying the U.S.'s legislation played an important role in the decline. Illegal logging legislation is also set to go into effect next year in the European Union.
"With this bill Australia becomes part of the solution, rather than part of the problem," Laurance added.
Enforcement of the law in the U.S. recently created a political furor after Gibson Guitars was investigated for importing illegal timber from rainforests in Madagascar. The charge led Gibson Guitars to kick-off a campaign, championed by industrial loggers in Asia and local Tea Party activists, to try and weaken the Lacey Act. In the end, however Gibson Guitars paid $350,000 for violating the Lacey Act and forfeited illegal wood products worth over $250,000.
Our philosophy, like most of the forest products industry, has been to conduct business and manage forests in a way that ensures the timber resources we rely upon will remain healthy and available for future generations.
However, these efforts are severely undermined by illegal loggers .. https://theconversation.edu.au/illegal-logging-takes-30-football-fields-a-minute-why-isnt-australia-acting-6002 , who pillage national parks and protected areas around the world. Some employ slave and child labour, aid drug trafficking, fund terrorism, and spur violent conflict in communities. Illegal logging has devastated forests and wildlife and is a significant driver of the 30 million acres of tropical forest cleared every year.
Many of Australia’s closest neighbours, including Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Indonesia, are struggling with some of the highest levels of illegal logging in the world. A recent example reported by the Environmental Investigation Agency .. http://www.eia-international.org/unchallenged-crimes-of-rotten-apple-palm-oil-company .. reveals that the palm oil company PT Suryamas Cipta Perkasa illegally cleared a peat forest in central Borneo that contained substantial stands of the valuable hardwood species ramin, illegal to cut in Indonesia. This clearing destroyed the habitat for a population of 600 endangered Bornean orangutans, which – adding insult to injury – the company also paid people to hunt and kill. The livelihoods of the local residents were destroyed along with the forest. One-third of the community moved away.
[image] - Illegal logging destroys the habitat of threatened species and local people. CIFOR
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has prioritised halting illegal deforestation and has called upon importing countries to help by stating,
If you want to do good, let’s work together to sort out the timber industry. Other countries should stop fencing illegally felled timber.
While illegal logging is a lucrative business for organised criminal operations, it robs developing countries of an estimated $10 billion annually. Logging gangs evade paying fees for use of natural resources, smuggle timber out of forest nations, and do the high-value, job creating work of processing thousands of miles from the communities that depend on the forests for their livelihood. Illegal logging also undercuts companies who play by the rules, making it extremely difficult to compete in the global marketplace and resulting in job losses.
That’s why, in 2008, we worked with a broad coalition to advance the world’s first prohibition on the import and trade of illegal wood and wood products. Just as in Australia, environmental groups and the timber industry are often at each other’s throats. But when it comes to illegal logging, we’ve found common ground. Supporters of the Lacey Act include everyone from Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to Fortune 500 companies like International Paper and American’s largest landowner, Plum Creek, as well as smaller lumber businesses.
[image] - The logging industry and environmentalists are often at each other’s throats: this is something they can work together on. Still Wild Still Threatened
Extraordinarily, support for this law has, for the most part, crossed the partisan divide in America at one of the most politically polarised times in our history. The law emerged from a Bush administration initiative, but was supported as enthusiastically by left wing Democrats as conservative Republicans. Indeed, when the Lacey Act recently came under attack from a politically well-connected importer that was accused of violating it, the law’s opponents couldn’t muster the votes to undermine it.
Coming together to achieve this goal has cut global illegal logging by 22% – good news for orangutans, tigers, and communities that depend on forests. And it’s helping to protect the lungs of our planet which are increasingly important as we all face the challenges of climate change.
It’s also been good for the economy. In 2006, the US ran a $20.3 billion deficit with China in forest products; in 2010, the US ran a $600 million surplus. This dramatic reversal is due in large part to the 2008 Lacey Act forest provisions, which spurred many Chinese manufacturers to ask for low risk, legal and sustainable hardwoods. Our domestic resource fit that bill; so would Australia’s.
One country alone cannot fully stop illegal logging, which is driven by a complex global market. With the US Lacey Act, the EU Timber Regulation, and hopefully the Australian Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill joining forces in blocking illegal wood imports, we can continue to make significant progress in curbing global forest crime.
This article was co-authored by Jameson S. French, the President and CEO of Northland Forest Products, Inc, based in New Hampshire, USA.
Climate Change Challenges Transportation System In The U.S.
By JOAN LOWY Posted: 11/22/2012 3:13 am EST Updated: 11/22/2012 9:38 am EST
WASHINGTON (AP) — Wild weather is taking a toll on roads, airports, railways and transit systems across the country.
That's leaving states and cities searching for ways to brace for more catastrophes like Superstorm Sandy that are straining the nation's transportation lifelines beyond what their builders imagined.
Despite their concerns about intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud a source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association's guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming.
"There is a whole series of standards that are going to have to be revisited in light of the change in climate that is coming at us," said John Horsley, the association's executive director.
In the latest and most severe example, Superstorm Sandy inflicted the worst damage to the New York subway system in its 108-year history, halted Amtrak and commuter train service to the city for days, and forced cancellation of thousands of airline flights at airports in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
In Washington state, "we joked we were having 100-year storms every year," said Paula Hammond, head of the state's Department of Transportation.
Last year flooding threatened to swallow up the Omaha, Neb., airport, which sits on a bend in the Missouri River. The ground beneath the airfield became saturated, causing about 100 sinkholes and "soil boils" — uplifted areas of earth where water bubbles to the surface. The airport was spared through a massive effort that included installing 70 dewatering wells and stacking sandbags around airport equipment and buildings.
Record-smashing heat from Colorado to Virginia last summer caused train tracks to bend and highway pavement to buckle. A US Airways jet was delayed at Washington's Reagan National Airport after its wheels got stuck in a soft spot in the tarmac.
Dallas had more than five weeks of consecutive 100 degree-plus high temperatures. "That puts stress on pavements that previously we didn't see," Horsley said.
States and cities are trying to come to terms with what the change means to them and how they can prepare for it. Transportation engineers build highways and bridges to last 50 or even 100 years. Now they are reconsidering how to do that, or even whether they can, with so much uncertainty.
No single weather event, even a storm like Sandy, can be ascribed with certainty to climate change, according to scientists. But the increasing severity of extreme events fits with the kind of changing climate conditions that scientists have observed.
For example, several climate scientists say sea level along New York and much of the Northeast is about a foot higher than a century ago, mostly because of man-made global warming, and that added significantly to the damage when Sandy hit.
Making transportation infrastructure more resilient will be expensive, and the bill would come at a particularly difficult time. Aging highways, bridges, trains and buses already are in need of repair or replacement and no longer can handle peak traffic demands. More than 140,000 bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete. The problem only will worsen as the U.S. population grows.
A congressional commission estimated that all levels of government together are spending $138 billion a year less than is needed to maintain the current system and to make modest improvements.
"The infrastructure of the nation is aging and it's at risk because, quite frankly, we're all not investing enough to take care of these facilities," said Hammond, the chairwoman of the climate committee. "And now we're facing extreme weather threats that cause us to need emergency response capabilities beyond what we've had in the past."
In Washington state, "we have seen more erratic weather patterns that we haven't had before, so we really can't imagine what kind of winter or summer we're going to have anymore," Hammond said.
More frequent heavy rainfalls in the western half of the state have increased the volume and velocity of water in rivers and streams, undermining the foundations of bridges. Rising sea levels are eroding coastal roads. In the drier eastern half of the state, more frequent wildfires have forced road maintenance crews to change their methods in an effort to prevent sparks that might cause a blaze.
"Each time you replace a bridge, states have to be thinking about not just what kind of traffic demand there is, but how do I make sure this is a bridge that will withstand the future given the erratic weather patterns and climate change we're seeing," Hammond said. "It's a new layer of analysis."
About half the states have taken some steps toward assessing their most critical vulnerabilities, experts said. But few have gone to the next step of making preparations. New York was an exception. Not only had transit officials made detailed assessments of the potential effects of climate change, but they'd started to put protections in place. Subway entrances and ventilation grates were raised in low-lying areas to reduce flooding, but that effort was overwhelmed by Sandy.
"They got hit with what was even worse than even their worst-case scenario," said Deron Lovaas, a transportation expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. "This was an active test of ... climate preparedness, and they failed."
While more than 97 percent of the scientists who publish peer-reviewed research say that global warming is real and man-made, the issue remains highly charged. In conservative states, the term "climate change" is often associated with left-leaning politics.
Planning for weather extremes is hampered by reluctance among many officials to discuss anything labeled "climate change," Horsley said.
"In the Northeast, you can call it climate change. ... That's an acceptable term in that region of the country," he said. "Elsewhere, in the South and the (Mountain) West, it's still not an acceptable term because of ideology or whatever you want to call it."
For example, Horsley said, in North Dakota, where there has been severe flooding in recent years, state officials avoid bringing up global warming, preferring to couch their discussions on how to shore up infrastructure as flood preparation.
The Obama administration has also shied away from talking publicly about adaptation to climate change. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's office refused to allow any department officials to be interviewed by The Associated Press about the agency's efforts to help states adapt. The Transportation Department and other federal agencies are involved in preparing a national assessment of climate change impacts and adaptations that may be needed. Their report is expected to be finished in the next few months.
Steve Winkelman, director of transportation and adaptation programs at the Center for Clean Air Policy, said he uses terms like "hazard mitigation" and "emergency preparedness" rather than climate change when talking to state and local officials.
"This is about my basement flooding, not the polar bear — what I call inconvenient sewer overflow," Winkelman said. "It makes it real."
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