Community forestry: Recommendations on adapting timber traceability systems for community use

Timber traceability is a growing global trend. Governments and consumers require reliable tracking of products sold with claims to legality or sustainability from their origin throughout the supply chain. Timber traceability contributes to multiple forest sector priorities, including promoting legal compliance, encouraging formalization, suppressing illegal timber markets, increasing sector governance and transparency, and facilitating due diligence. Better timber traceability also contributes to more thorough monitoring and data reconciliation, and the improvement of forest statistics to inform policy development and planning in the forestry sector.

Due to a lack of digital literacy, many communities rely heavily on manual data recording, leading to errors which hinder management and decision-making. Without well-developed mechanisms to "manage the species in stock" (i.e., the commercial tree species present in the forest), monitoring of production data and documenting the legal origin of timber are made more challenging. The use of traceability systems can facilitate forest inventories and sustainable harvesting and enables communities to generate reliable and consistent information on the legal origin of timber which they can pass to buyers. The system captures an accurate picture of operations within community forests, preventing illegalities and ensuring that communities benefit from their forest resources.

However, timber traceability systems implemented in community forests must integrate local realities and accommodate local capacities. By sharing the lessons learned from the FAO-EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Programme (hereafter the Programme) on developing and implementing traceability systems for community use, it is hoped that this information can support future actions for other communities around the globe.