Please download the Document: Here

Happy summer! We’ve been busy in the last few months. In March, we hosted a workshop in Guatemala on innovative technologies for timber traceability. Co-sponsored by the Government of Guatemala, IUCN and FAO, workshop participants included representatives from governments, technology innovators, NGOs and the private sector. Representation from Latin America was particularly robust, but participants hailed from as far away as Ghana and Indonesia. You can read more about the technologies discussed at the workshop on the next page.

As many of you may be aware, the current cooperative grant agreement between WRI and the U.S. Agency for International Development which has supported the FLA for the past seven years will end this coming September. First, we would like to express our gratitude to USAID for its sustained financial and technical support for FLA since 2010. Secondly, we would like to let you know that WRI will continue working on timber legality going forward – including maintaining many elements of the FLA. So we expect to continue working with many of your in the months and years to come.

On July 6 and 7, we will host the final FLA semi-annual member meeting under our agreement with USAID, in WRI’s newly-renovated conference facilities. With the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to CITES being held in South Africa in the end of September – with timber species receiving unprecedented attention – we are focusing most of the upcoming meeting on CITES timber issues. Sessions will include:

• Key timber issues at CITES COP17 (September 2016) | Milena Sosa Schmidt, CITES Secretariat, will address some key issues on timber species to be raised at the next Conference of Parties (COP17) of the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES)

• Wood identification technologies for CITES implementation | Shelley Gardner, Interpol, and Alex Wiedenhoeft, USFS Forest Products Lab, will discuss the current state of wood identification technologies for the enforcement of CITES, with additional presentations by the US Fish and Wildlife Service; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; and WWF Russia.

• CITES & timber: the case of Madagascar | Continuing the first CITES discussion, representatives from the CITES Secretariat, the World Bank, the University of Antananarivo and WRI will take a deeper dive into the case study of CITES-listed timber species from Madagascar

For more Information, please download the Document here below: