Putting numbers on timber illegality risk: the case of ipê in Pará

Abstract

Illegal logging remains widespread across the tropics, causing extensive forest degradation and trade in illegal timber products. By adapting environmentally extended input-output modeling to timber originating from Brazilian native forests, we demonstrate how distinct illegality risks can be mapped and quantified at species-level, across the supply-chain. We focus on high-value ipê from the Amazon state of Pará, a leading producer of timber and contested forest frontier. Data on logging permits and state- and national-level Document of Forest Origin are used to estimate illegality risks due to missing or invalid logging permits, overstated ipê yields, and discrepancies resulting from missing inflows of legal timber. We find that less than one fourth of all ipê volume entering supply-chains between 2009-2019 is risk-free and highlight diversified strategies for laundering of illegal timber are across geographies, information that can be leveraged to improve implementation and enforcement of existing forest regulations.