Please download ITTO Annual Report 2014 : Here

Message from the ITTO Executive Director: Emmanuel Ze Meka

ITTO and its members made significant progress in 2014 in its policy work and field projects and in setting foundations for the future. The Organization has continued to expand: with the accession to the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA) 2006 of the Central African Republic, Suriname and Viet Nam, the Organization’s membership has grown to 70, its largest ever.

In policy work, the International Tropical Timber Council adopted the Voluntary guidelines for the sustainable management of natural tropical forests, a state-of-the-art policy document encapsulating advances in collective knowledge on the legal, governance, institutional, ecological, social and economic issues facing tropical forests.

ITTO also convened—with our partners the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Costa Rica’s National Fund for Forest Finance—a landmark international forum on payments for the environmental services performed by tropical forests. One output of this forum was a policy brief, Rewarding the service providers, which sets out the rationale for payment schemes for environmental services and makes recommendations forscaling them up. ITTO also completed studies on the economic impact of government procurement policies on tropical timber markets and on the quantification of carbon benefits in ITTO projects, which undoubtedly will benefit forest managers in taking advantage of emerging opportunities in the timber and carbon markets.

ITTO-financed projects also made advances on the ground. Projects completed in 2014 have been influential in increasing forest cover in Togo and timber production in China, boosting livelihoods in Indonesia by better managing non-timber forest products, and, in Thailand, assisting families in tsunami-affected areas through the sustainable use of bamboo and improving the management of trees outside forests.

Completed projects and activities in the thematic programmes have assisted in rehabilitating degraded forest areas in Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria and, in Indonesia, in reducing carbon emissions from deforestation by building the capacity of community forest enterprises.

In 2014, ITTO also worked to set solid foundations for the future, in particular by:

• Establishing the Independent Market Monitoring system (IMM) for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and

Trade (FLEGT)-licensed timber entering the European Union (EU), which will help in monitoring and understanding market incentives for FLEGT-licensed timber

• Developing the world’s first environmental product declarations for tropical timber—meranti plywood in

Malaysia and Indonesia, khaya lumber in Ghana and ipé decking in Brazil (the latter ultimately published in

2015)—as a way of increasing the competitiveness of tropical timber in environmentally sensitive markets

• Renewing the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and ITTO, thereby extending collaboration between the two institutions under the Joint ITTO–CBD Collaborative Initiative for Tropical Forest Biodiversity

• Creating an online project search tool to further disseminate the knowledge gained in the implementation of sustainable forest management (SFM) in the field

• Commencing publication of the electronic newsletter, Tropical Forest News, which provides timely insights into ITTO’s work.

Please download ITTO Annual Report 2014: Here