Sustainable forest management is an important strategy for generating income for local communities while keeping forests standing. Compliance with the label requires following strict rules on the choice of trees that may be cut and when and how to do so. In the Brazilian Amazon, this works out to a maximum of three to five trees per hectare, Leonardo Sobral, forestry director at the Institute for Forest and Agricultural Management and Certification (Imaflora), a Brazilian NGO, told Mongabay. Loggers need to plan exactly where the tree will fall and the path to drag it out of the forest so it doesn’t damage other plants on its way out. Once the trunk is removed, they won’t be able to harvest another tree in the same area for around 30 years. “There are a series of techniques that need to be followed in order to comply with the legislation,” said Sobral, whose NGO advocates for good practices in the logging sector and audits certified forest management plans. Life on the ground, however, is often very different. “I’ve always worked inspecting forest management plans, and I’ve seen many brutal irregularities,” Vinicius Otavio Benoit Costa, an analyst with Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, told Mongabay. “There are a number of very serious frauds, up to and including the formation of gangs and criminal organizations involving forest management.” This mismatch between theory and real life prompted Costa, a forest engineer, to explore the issue in a master’s degree program at the Federal University of Paraná…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Amazon Fraud 101: How timber credits mask illegal logging in Brazil first appeared on EnviroLink Network.