- World Forest ID, a nonprofit consortium of research organizations, uses chemical and genetic profiling techniques to trace timber to the location where it was grown and harvested.
- The technique has been used to locate the origin of wood in the European Union and to keep a check on the import of products made with sanctioned Russian timber.
- The organization is now working to expand its database to include soy, cocoa and coffee to be able to use its technique when the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) comes into effect.
Imagine you purchased a swanky new chair. The paperwork claims the piece of furniture was made from legally sourced wood. But how can you be sure? After all, global supply chains are notoriously complicated and obscure. What if the chair was actually made from trees that were illegally chopped down?
World Forest ID, a nonprofit and global consortium of research organizations, is making it easier to answer that question. The organization uses chemical and genetic profiling techniques to pinpoint where a particular piece of wood was grown and harvested.
“We’re using science to make supply chains that track back to forests transparent,” Jade Saunders, executive director of World Forest ID, tells Mongabay in a video interview. “We’re doing that because we want them to be accountable.”
World Forest ID has worked with nonprofits, governments and enforcement agencies to track deforestation, provide scientific evidence for court cases, and keep a check on sanctioned Russian timber in the European Union. The organization is now preparing to expand its work in preparation for the highly anticipated, although now delayed, European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).
The regulation prevents the import into the EU of products linked to deforestation, such as timber, soy, cocoa, coffee, cattle, rubber and palm oil. Under the law, to take effect Dec. 30, 2025 — a year after its initial start date — companies will be mandated to ensure that their products aren’t sourced from deforested land. However, tracking products down to their location of origin isn’t an easy task, given the lack of transparency in supply chains and the numerous intermediaries involved in global trade.
This is where WFID hopes to make a difference, Saunders says. Apart from further developing its work with timber, the organization is now in the process of gathering and analyzing data for soy, cocoa and coffee.
The group uses a vast network of people around the world, ranging from nonprofit organizations, law enforcement agencies and researchers, to collect samples of trees and plants that fall within the purview of their work. They then extract chemical and genetic data from the samples to create reference databases that sort and classify the samples based on their location. The team then uses this database to check if a product comes from deforested land or not.
World Forest ID’s techniques rely on the basic scientific fact that “different species or populations of trees have different anatomical, chemical and genetic profiles because of species differences or geographic differences,” Andrew Lowe, executive director of the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and consortium lead at WFID, tells Mongabay in a video interview.
Jade Saunders and Andrew Lowe spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor about the science behind World Forest ID’s work and the challenges in adapting it for EUDR. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: How would you describe World Forest ID and the work being done there?
Jade Saunders: It can be described in so many different ways for different audiences, and Andy [Andrew Lowe] will probably have a different way of talking about it. We’re using science to make supply chains that track back to forests transparent, and we’re doing that because we want them to be accountable. We want the people who are making good decisions in those supply chains to have premium prices and to get through regulations. And at the same time, we want the people who are making bad decisions to be exposed so that they can be penalized.
Andrew Lowe: The other thing to add is that it is an international collaboration of a number of different groups that probably bring together some of the most advanced scientific methods to help stop illegal logging and deforestation.
Jade Saunders: The bringing together of a consortium of established people and institutions that can pull in knowledge, funding and political will in different countries is really critical if we are going to achieve something at scale.
Mongabay: Walk me through the journey of World Forest ID.
Jade Saunders: Andy and I have come from different spheres. Andy has come out of the science side and I’ve come out of the policy, enforcement and implementation side. We met in the middle at World Forest ID.
I was working with environmental prosecutors who were focusing on laws that were designed to tackle the trade of problematic trees and plants. There’s so much obfuscation in the global trading system. They want to maximize efficiency, and that means minimizing transparency. You just ask no questions about where the tree originated from, and just fill up the papers for the shipping container and get it on the water. We were looking at laws that were designed to track all the trade in problematic products, and we were hitting this barrier which is that there’s a huge amount of plausible deniability in the system. People don’t know where things came from. Even if they know where the last point of export is, they don’t know where that wood was harvested or where it grew.
We started to look at different scientific techniques that made it possible to scrutinize the relationship between the origin claim in the paperwork and the actual location of origin of the product. So that’s the perspective I came from. World Forest ID was set up by an informal consortium of organizations that saw that it was necessary to have a public good for the tracking techniques, protocols and reference data.
Andrew Lowe: It’s good to describe it as two worlds colliding within World Forest ID. From a science perspective, we are talking about 20 or 30 years of development to really get to the basis of some of those techniques to understand where timber comes from. A lot of those techniques were invested in heavily by the European Union, and also in the U.S., particularly with methods like DNA analysis and also stable isotope analysis.
There have been a couple of key initiatives that have gone before us. One of those is the Forest Legality Alliance in the U.S., run through the World Resources Institute. Originally, it was a bit more policy-focused and had a strong focus on wood anatomy and fiber analysis. And over in Europe, there was the Global Timber Tracking Network that was supported by the German government. They had a strong focus on genetics. Both of those initiatives came to the end of their funding, and so there was a bit of a vacuum. World Forest ID was able to pick up on this and integrate some of the learnings from those previous initiatives, particularly around standardization of methods, how to store data and how to make that accessible to the right people. A lot of the development of these methods sat in the Global North, and I think the challenge has been to apply those methods to the Global South because that’s where most of the timber is harvested, produced and shipped from. That’s still an ongoing challenge for an entity like World Forest ID.
Mongabay: Could you break down the science behind World Forest ID’s technique? How do you track a piece of timber to where it was grown?
Andrew Lowe: To answer that question, we need to start with what the problems are. When you’re dealing with timber trade, the legality issues center around what species is being traded because you don’t want to be trading endangered species that shouldn’t be traded. The other issue is that you don’t want to be taking timber from places that it shouldn’t be harvested from, like, say, from national parks. You really need to have scientific techniques that can distinguish those two questions.
In terms of what species it is, there’s probably two or three techniques that are quite reliable. The first one is you can have a look at the wood, and you can have a look at the grain in the wood, and that’s called wood anatomy. There are very sophisticated ways you can look at that. We used to do it under a microscope, but you can now use computer vision to distinguish that. The other technique is DNA barcoding. That is, being able to distinguish between species using a genetic code.
Now, where does it come from? That’s what we focus on. There’s a range of chemical and genetic methods that can be used. Stable isotope analysis was a method that was used by geologists to look at differences in soil and the differences in the ratio of isotopes of things like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. They were really interested in the geological basis of those because it tells you something about the history of the Earth. But then they realized that the plants that grow in the soil also take on these stable isotope ratios. So that’s quite a high-level method for distinguishing between regional areas. Within that, you can also apply other elements. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon — they exist naturally as different isotopes which have different atomic numbers. But you can look at the periodic table and almost all molecules have different isotopes that you’re able to distinguish. As our scientific ability has improved, we’re able to distinguish between many of those different molecules and different types. We call it elemental profiling, and it’s part of the stable isotope analysis methodology. So those are two methods.
We can use DNA as well. With DNA, I like to compare it back to human populations. There are natural differences in eye color, hair color between different people. And it’s the same with trees. Different populations will have different genetic profiles that you can then use to distinguish between the origin of those populations.
There is another method that’s showing good development, and it’s called DART-TOFMS. It uses ionizing radiation and basically shines ionizing radiation onto a piece of wood that then atomizes some of these complex molecules. Then, that’s passed through a chemical separation process to determine the size and charge of those molecules.
They’re all relying on the fact that either different species or different populations of trees have different anatomical, chemical or genetic profiles because of the species differences or the geographic differences.
Jade Saunders: What it means is you can go out across forests and farms and take samples and measure all these different things in them: the stable isotope ratios, the trace elements that accrue in the fiber of the tree or the other plant, and also which genetic population they fit into. You can ultimately create a map of the landscape which says, “This is what this tree will look like if it grows here.”
You can use these bundles of information about the chemistry of different species or different genus groups at different points in the landscape to try and work out what’s happening here. Once you have a reference landscape for different genus groups or the trees across the environmental range, you can take something out of a shipping container where you don’t know where it comes from and measure all the same things, and then compare it with the reference data for the landscape and work out where it grew. It’s about that comparison between all the information you’ve collected physically and what’s going on in the shipping container.
Mongabay: Tell me about how you built the reference database.
Andrew Lowe: That’s an important component, being able to build up those reference data sets from reliable information that’s collected by credible laboratories under standardized conditions. We have got a number of staff involved in collection, working with local agencies in countries around the world.
Jade Saunders: We have an app that collectors take out into the field. We have training information about how to take a sample, what sample to take. The app collects the GPS and the timestamp, and it knows who has done the collection, who has overseen that collection, and who has trained that collector. So there’s a fair amount of information in the back end. It also captures all of the legal permissions. There’s a pretty onerous training process to get people to a point where they’re going out and taking samples in forests and farms across the world.
Then everything gets shipped to one of the consortium hubs where it is reviewed. Then the analysis work starts to happen. So that includes measurement of all of these different chemical values and all of these pieces of information that we can capture about the way that the tree grows at that point in its environment. Then all of that data gets pulled together and we start to train origin models that can be used for verification.
What the origin model does is allow you to create that landscape map. The ambition is for the accuracy and precision to be improved and for it to be fed with more information that’s not just derived from physical samples. Physical samples are expensive. There are political challenges in getting hold of them. There are also often security challenges. So the more that we can use environmental data, Earth observation data and other things like that to start to feed the origin model, the better because it becomes less expensive, less risky and less challenging from a legal and bureaucratic perspective.
Mongabay: How are you preparing to adapt your work for the European Union Deforestation Regulation?
Andrew Lowe: The EUDR specifically has a geographic location aspect. It’s not only about if that specific species of timber is legal, but also asks the question of if it comes from a place where there’s deforestation. So that’s significant.
Jade Saunders: In 2019, I was pulled in by the U.K. government to advise on the development of the U.K. deforestation regulation. There was a commitment to create a due diligence regulation for deforestation-risk commodities. At the same time, I was also working with some European NGOs who were lobbying on the development of the EUDR. It’s so easy to falsify where the stuff comes from that everybody simply claims is from a legitimate source.
Starting in 2019, we have been developing a database for soy and cocoa along with timber. We now have a really broad, deep soy database, and we have a pretty amazing cocoa database. The origin models need to be built. Papers need to be written. They need to be turned into tools. We still need to show local NGOs and actors in the countries where they have implications on how to use them. There’s a lot of work to be done. But the first investment for soy and cocoa has been made. And there’s pretty good data knocking around within the consortium on coffee as well. Once the EUDR starts to seem like a reality and there’s actual funding associated with it, we think we’re probably in a good position to pull together a pretty good origin model for coffee. For palm oil, rubber and beef, we’ve got less well-developed protocols and methods. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but I think that there will continue to be challenges until somebody invests at scale.
One thing that’s been depressing but not that surprising to me is how totally absent funding is in the EU for operationalizing the EU Deforestation Regulation. There’s been this huge investment of political capital to get the law together. But there is nothing that I can see in the member states and in the European institutions that’s seriously looking at ways to fund the implementation of this.
Mongabay: What have been the big hurdles in doing this work?
Andrew Lowe: Finding funding to build the reference data is quite difficult. It’s relatively expensive to build these, and you need specialist labs and specialist employees to be able to do the job. It’s not a trivial task. Getting access to samples from areas where illegal logging is being undertaken is potentially dangerous. You need to have those networks and be able to then ship samples to laboratories around the world for analysis.
There are all kinds of legislative requirements as well. You might potentially be in contravention of biopiracy laws if you’re going to do certain types of analysis even though you’re trying to do something good. Then you’ve got to be able to work with groups of people that probably have some different visions and have come from different areas.
Jade Saunders: I genuinely think people want the right thing. I think that one of the challenges is that the incentives around different groups that need to work together are misaligned. So you have academics who are really thinking about papers. You can churn out papers that speak to techniques and data sets but that are not really scalable. So there’s a challenge there. How do you meet the needs of academics to get their work published but also figure out the point at which we’re going to scale these techniques? Moving into a space where there have been competing commercial and academic interests is a challenge.
Mongabay: Assuming the EUDR comes close to becoming a reality soon, what can we expect to hear from World Forest ID in the next six months?
Jade Saunders: Six months is a blink of an eye in academic terms. Give us a couple of years. [laughs]
Let’s talk about next year and say that the EUDR is in force. And let’s say that there has been a loosening of the purse strings. Financial constraints off the table and legislative clarity in place, we will have origin models for timber out of the Congo Basin in West Africa and the Amazon Basin. We will have built a spatial platform that maps the data that we have from different scientific techniques with the other environmental data that’s already been pulled together in a geospatial context.
We will have rolling soy, cocoa and coffee data sets that companies, enforcement officials and certification schemes can start to work with. We want to eventually get to the same place we are with timber with these new commodities that are being brought on board. And ultimately, we hope that people who are making good decisions in supply chains will be able to trade without concerns and without risks, and for people who are making less good decisions, there’ll be downsides.
Andrew Lowe: The other thing is bringing on board some of those industry groups as well to be able to work with them to implement the testing so that industry can quickly and easily do the right thing. There are clearly some out there that don’t, but I think a lot of the industry really wants to have these kinds of new techniques available so they can verify and check their supply chains. Ultimately, it’s what their shareholders and what their customers demand. I think that developing that working group with industries around the implementation of this is the next step.
Banner image: World Forest ID collects samples from around the world and uses chemical and genetic profiling techniques to create a database that classifies timber and other plants based on their location of origin. Image courtesy of World Forest ID.
Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.
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