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Regulation Impact Statement on illegally logged timber

12 Feb 2010

As part of its election commitments, the Australian Government is looking to develop a regulatory framework to address the environmental, economic and social issues arising from the trade of illegally logged timber. The aim of the proposed framework will be to encourage the sourcing of forest products from sustainable forest practices and to restrict imports to Australia of illegally logged timber and associated products.

The Office of Best Practice Regulation informed the Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries that a Regulation Impact Statement is required to assess the impacts of pursuing two elements of the commitment:

identifying illegally logged timber and restricting its import into Australia
requiring disclosure at point of sale of species, country of origin and any certification.

TheCIE has identified multiple issues associated with developing measures to combat illegal logging, which are summarised in the Issues Paper and the benefits and costs are quantified in the draft Regulation Impact Statement (see press release).

TheCIE final report to the Department can be accessed below, along with the issues paper, the draft Regulation Impact Statement and the responses we have received from interested stakeholders. (The views expressed in submissions are those of the organisations or authors to the submissions - they are not those of TheCIE. TheCIE accepts no responsibility for the contents of these submissions.)

The final report includes some amendments to the draft Regulation Impact Statement. The main changes are the inclusion of a consultation statement (chapter 8), more detail on various estimates of the non-market (social and environmental) costs of illegal logging (appendix C), the addition of a conclusion chapter (chapter 9), and an amended Executive Summary.

For related information on this project see the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry's illegal logging page.

View final report online [pdf, 753KB]

View issues paper [pdf, 611KB]

View PDF version of the Draft RIS released 13 October 2009 [pdf, 797KB]

View HTML version of the Draft RIS released 13 October 2009 [htm, 1381KB]