on this scale in the UK – for one, the towering old growth that provides financial incentive to poach in the Pacific Northwest is not as plentiful over here.
But illegal wood does inevitably cross our borders in other ways.Globally, the black market for timber is estimated at $157 billion, a figure that includes the market value of the wood, unpaid taxes and lost revenues.
The United Nations Environmental Programme estimates that illegal logging accounts for somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent of the overall timber trade.
That illegal wood inevitably makes its way into our homes – right now, the UK meets about 80 per cent of its consumer demand for timber products through imports.According to the research firm Forest Trends, direct imports from countries deemed ‘high risk’ for illegal logging (like Democratic Republic of Congo, Papua New Guinea, Ukraine, Brazil and Russia) have increased by 59 per cent over the past decade.I have spent the last decade investigating a small part of this global problem: tree poaching from national parks and forests in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk