British firm vows to use software and satellites to track down illegal timber shipments

An Oxford-based firm is to open a new front in the fight to tackle illegal logging with the development of software designed to track timber shipments through their complex supply chain and provide purchasers with the ability to verify where timber has come from.

Helveta announced today that it is to accelerate the development and deployment of the technology after closing a £1m funding round involving Carbon Trust Investments, Oxford Capital Partners, Albion Venture and Success Europe.

The company's software uses a combination of satellite technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, barcode, and asset tracking to ensure timber has not been sourced from illegal plantations.

Firms using the technology map the boundaries of a permitted area using GPS devices to ensure that felling does not extend into protected areas. They tag felled trees with barcodes or RFID tags so that purchasers can track harvested timber through every point in the supply chain, providing a real-time audit trail.

Deforestation is widely held as being responsible for about 17 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and despite the introduction of increasingly tight rules designed to curb deforestation rates, many countries still find it difficult to enforce new regulations.

Peter Linthwaite, managing partner for Carbon Trust Investment Partners, said the introduction of new forestry rules meant there was a growing market for Helveta's technology. "Helveta provides a uniquely robust means of delivering the necessary information to implement increasingly demanding regulations, and we are very excited about the opportunity this presents," he said.

The company has already deployed the software in Liberia, South Africa, Bolivia and Ghana and, according to chief executive Patrick Newton, is looking to expand into new Central African markets.

The firm also signalled that it could adapt the tracking software for use in other industries where supply chains can have a negative impact on the environment, such as agriculture and livestock.

There have recently been signs that the battle to address illegal logging is slowly being won, after new figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show that the rate of deforestation slowed during the past decade.

The agency reported that 13 million hectares (ha) of forest were lost each year on average between 2000 and 2010, compared to 16 million ha a year during the 1990s. Increased reforestation also meant that the net loss of forested land fell from 8.8 million ha a year in the 1990s to 5.2 million ha a year during the noughties.

The organisation warned that the rates of deforestation remained far too high, but noted that encouraging progress was being made in the world's most forested countries, Brazil and Indonesia, to tackle the problem.

Proposals for tackling deforestation also marked one of the few areas where genuine progress was achieved at last year's Copenhagen climate change summit, where it was agreed that a new multibillion-dollar fund would be launched to help support forest protection initiatives and deliver an improved forest monitoring network.