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Forest Transparency Workshop

Summary · Toolbox of Best Practices · Complete Report (HTML)(PDF) · Agenda · Participant List · Presentations · Pictures

Promoting Transparency in the Forest Sector: 

Best Practices for Detecting Illegal and 

Destructive Commercial Logging

May 29-31, 2002

A three-day workshop on best practices for detecting illegal and destructive commercial logging was held in Washington, D.C. May 29-31, 2002. The objectives of the workshop were to:

1. Facilitate exchanges of experiences of practitioners involved in the detection and monitoring of illegal and destructive commercial logging;
2. Identify training opportunities, best practices, and key tools, techniques and methods;
3. Review techniques for communicating results and influencing forestry policies;
4. Identify opportunities for collaboration and mutual reinforcement.
5. Gather information to produce an outline or ‘toolbox’ of methods and best practices needed to document and track illegal logging activities.
6. Share experiences and allow practitioners to network with a broader audience to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

During the first two days, participants from 12 countries (see Figure 1) stayed at a conference center outside of Washington and shared lessons and experiences. 

The sessions included in the first two days were:  Framework for Monitoring (see Figure 2), Field Investigations (see Presentations 1 and 2),  Paper Audits (see Presentations 3 and 4), Transparency/Access (see Presentations 5, 6 and 7) and Communicating Results for Change (see Presentations 8, 9, and 10).  Based on the shared information, participants broke into small groups and discussed governance, security, transparency, corruption issues to achieve best practice to detect illegal logging as well as to identify the opportunities for collaboration. 

On the third day, participants gathered in Washington, DC at the offices of the World Resources Institute. In the morning, they participated in another session on Remote Sensing (Presentation 11). The afternoon consisted of a presentation (see Presentation 13) to a broad DC audience including World Bank, US Government departments, White House Council on Environmental Quality and industry groups.  Participants from the workshop presented five case studies from all corners of the globe (Brazil, Canada, Cameroon, Russia and Indonesia) that highlighted best practices of monitoring and examples of how this monitoring has been creating change in the management of forests.

This workshop was hosted by the World Resources Institute, and sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Forest Service (USFS).

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