Forest Declaration Assessment

The 2022 Forest Declaration Assessment Theme 4 report evaluates global forest governance systems and their capacity to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. It finds that while some countries have implemented effective legal tools like moratoria and inclusive policies, overall progress is insufficient, with persistent issues including widespread corruption, tenure insecurity for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and the rollback of environmental protections in several major tropical forest nations.

• Global forest governance is currently insufficient to meet 2030 goals, evidenced by high levels of illegality. Between 2013 and 2019, at least 32 million hectares of tropical deforestation driven by commercial agriculture were illegal, and at least 15 percent of timber exports over the last two decades were illegal.
• Legal instruments such as moratoria have successfully reduced deforestation in specific contexts. Indonesia saw reductions following moratoria and improved enforcement, and Brazil experienced a decline in deforestation between 2004 and 2012 partly due to the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon region (PPCDAm).
• Several major tropical forest countries have recently rolled back social and environmental regulations. In Indonesia, the Omnibus Law on Job Creation has weakened safeguards by removing the 30% minimum forest cover requirement for islands and eliminating strict liability for businesses whose concession areas burn.
• Demand-side regulations in importing nations have contributed to a decline in the proportion of illegal timber trade globally, falling from at least 23 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2018. The U.S. Lacey Act and EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) are cited as having positive impacts, though the EUTR faces inconsistent enforcement across member states.
• Tenure insecurity remains a critical global issue, with at least 50 percent of lands and territories held by Indigenous Peoples (IPs) and local communities (LCs) lacking legal recognition. Africa has the largest portion of unrecognized community lands, with nearly 300 million hectares estimated to be unrecognized in Sudan, the DRC, and the Central African Republic alone.
• Corruption is widespread in forest-rich regions, facilitating illegal timber trade. Examples include corrupt schemes to export illegal rosewood from Senegal through The Gambia to China between 2012 and 2020, involving the Senegalese army and high-level Gambian officials.
• There is a trend toward recognizing the 'rights of nature' to protect forests. In 2021, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador ruled that mining in protected areas violated the constitutional rights of nature, and in April 2022, a court in Tamil Nadu, India, granted forest rights to nature to improve conservation.
• The Republic of the Congo has improved its governance framework through the 2020 Forest Code, which integrates Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), recognizes independent forest monitoring by civil society, and provides for community benefit-sharing in logging revenues.
• Protected areas are increasingly subject to 'downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement' (PADDD), with 61 percent of these events driven by industrial-scale resource extraction and development. The United States and Brazil are identified as emerging hotspots for PADDD.

APA

Forest Declaration Assessment (2022). Forest Declaration Assessment. https://forestdeclaration.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022Theme4.pdf

Chicago

Forest Declaration Assessment. Forest Declaration Assessment. 2022. https://forestdeclaration.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022Theme4.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Forest Declaration Assessment |title=Forest Declaration Assessment |date=October 2022 |url=https://forestdeclaration.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022Theme4.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{forestdeclarationassessment2022forest, author = {{Forest Declaration Assessment}}, title = {{Forest Declaration Assessment}}, institution = {Forest Declaration Assessment}, year = {2022}, month = oct, url = {https://forestdeclaration.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022Theme4.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }