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Earthsight

Our mission is to promote the use of in-depth investigations to expose environmental and social crimes, injustice and their links to global consumption.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Katarína Roth Neveďalová (Member of the European Parliament)

27 Jan 2026 · Leather industry and EU deforestation legislation

Meeting with Kira Marie Peter-Hansen (Member of the European Parliament) and Transport and Environment (European Federation for Transport and Environment) and

17 Nov 2025 · Sustainability omnibus - update for civil society

Meeting with César Luena (Member of the European Parliament)

12 Nov 2025 · Deforestation Regulation

Meeting with Kira Marie Peter-Hansen (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur) and Transport and Environment (European Federation for Transport and Environment) and

3 Nov 2025 · Sustainability omnibus - update for civil society

Meeting with Kira Marie Peter-Hansen (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur) and Transport and Environment (European Federation for Transport and Environment) and

2 Oct 2025 · Sustainability omnibus - update for civil society

Meeting with César Luena (Member of the European Parliament)

15 Jul 2025 · Deforestation

Meeting with Ilhan Kyuchyuk (Member of the European Parliament)

16 May 2025 · Omnibus 1 package & simplification efforts

Meeting with Karin Karlsbro (Member of the European Parliament) and Human Rights Watch and Fern

4 Mar 2025 · Avskogningsförordningen

Meeting with Pär Holmgren (Member of the European Parliament)

21 Mar 2024 · Textiles (staff level)

Meeting with Marie Toussaint (Member of the European Parliament)

20 Mar 2024 · Supply chain - deforestation & due diligence

Meeting with Christophe Hansen (Member of the European Parliament, Rapporteur)

8 Jun 2022 · Deforestation regulation

Meeting with Kateřina Konečná (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur)

11 May 2022 · Deforestation

Meeting with Delara Burkhardt (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur) and Fern

11 May 2022 · deforestation

Response to Illegal logging – evaluation of EU rules (fitness check)

28 Feb 2020

The European Union Timber Regulation is a pioneering piece of legislation and remains a vital tool in the global fight against illegal deforestation and the associated trade in commodities. While there have been laudable steps taken by a few Member States to enforce this law over the years, these instances have remained the exception rather than the rule. It has now been seven years since the EUTR entered into force and the enforcement response to illegal logging cases, even cases where plentiful evidence of illegality related to specific companies or supply chains has been made public, has been poor. Overall, as an exhaustive new study this year also shows, implementation has been piecemeal, and penalties, when they are issued, have been far from dissuasive, or proportionate to the violations detected. Our organisation has researched and documented several instances where timber products at very high risk of being procured or traded illegally have entered EU states, and have made them publicly available via our Timberleaks platform or in-depth reports. We have also sent these directly to EUTR competent authorities. One of the common threads running through our investigations is that almost all the companies we have named in them as being connected to illegal deforestation, bribery or corruption, are certified, mainly buy certified wood, and source timber from certified forests. Timber industry bodies have acknowledged that certification is no guarantee of legality and that companies must do more to ensure products they are importing are not illegally sourced. Although certification can lead to better forest governance and protection in some cases, reports have shown this impact is reduced in countries with high levels of corruption and poor levels of governance. These countries are also the countries with the highest forest cover, and consequently, some of the major sources of timber to the EU. The FSC has acknowledged that voluntary standards were not designed to deal with corruption and that certification is no substitute for the role of the state. Numerous other organisations have documented the failures of voluntary certification schemes like FSC or PEFC to provide assurances of legality, through in-depth investigations and reports. Three years ago, the largest environmental organisation in the world, Greenpeace, renounced its membership of the FSC, saying that it had become a tool for timber extraction and was failing to protect forests. There are systemic issues with the way that voluntary certification standards like FSC and PEFC are written, financed and implemented, that allow these problems to occur. This means that taken on their own, they can be no guarantee of legality, or even the sustainability, of products certified. Until these systemic issues are acknowledged and resolved, it would be disastrous to make certification a necessary requirement for operators seeking to meet their due diligence obligations, or for Competent Authorities to give certified products a green lane under the EUTR. We believe that voluntary certifications like FSC were created with good intentions and can have a place in meeting EUTR-mandated due diligence standards, but only if they are first significantly overhauled. More broadly, Earthsight would like to see the EUTR product scope covered to include all types of furniture as well as charcoal and paper products, and for the due diligence requirement to be extended to cover all actors in the supply chain. We are living in a time of climate chaos and mass species extinction. Illegal deforestation is a driver of both. The EU, as a major consumer of deforestation-driving commodities, needs to ramp up future illegal timber enforcement to be equal to these threats, and to meet the challenges that lie ahead. [The attached document contains links and references that provide additional background to the above statements].
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