The EIA team which launched the new Forest Campaign report Organised Chaos: The illicit overland timber trade between Myanmar and China in Beijing met in Yangon, Myanmar with civil society groups, media, activists and representatives of international institutions such as the EU and DFID
The report 'Organised Chaos' and its accompanying film expose the scale, methods and key named actors who organise the growing illegal timber trade into China that is wreaking chaos in the forests of Myanmar.
EIA has been working closely with a network of activists to set up an innovative system for forest monitoring in Aceh, a province on the very western tip of Indonesia hosting some of the richest forests in Asia, especially the peerless Leuser Ecosystem which is home to Sumatran tigers, elephants, orangutans and rhinos
Looking back over the past 12 months, during which EIA celebrated its 30th anniversary, it’s evident that 2014 has been yet another hectic and successful year
When we requested data on companies from the Government, it was very difficult. Officials in the districts and province refused to provide data, and when they did it was often incomplete. It seems to us that there is an attempt to stop all stakeholders accessing information
From EIA’s perspective, corruption is a key enabling factor in environmental crime, especially the theft of natural resources. Research has shown that the more affected it is by corruption, the poorer a country’s environmental performance – a theoretical link borne out by the findings of many EIA field investigations