In short
How illegal deforestation and weak timber rules keep damaging forests, focusing on Papua New Guinea’s logging and the EU’s efforts to stop illegal wood entering markets, including Germany’s “timber detectives” who test wood samples.
Guests/backgrounds
Becca Warner, Berlin-based environmental journalist; Samuel Kimme, Papua New Guinean forest defender and former NGO worker; Julia Christian, environmental lawyer at FERN; Gerald (Gerhard), wood-identification scientist at the Thünen Institute in Hamburg.
Key claims
Global deforestation is rising; over two-thirds of illegal logging occurs in some regions; EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) has gaps (derived products, mislabeling, uneven border checks, weak sanctions). New EUDR (implementation Dec 2025) adds traceability and geolocation polygons.
Notable examples
Quilla tree exports from PNG; palm oil expansion (139,000 hectares in one region); Samuel’s 2020 Facebook arrest for “classified information”; Thünen Institute finding ~20% of samples don’t match paperwork; EU wrong declarations dropping from ~35% to below 20% since 2013.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOMeeting Germany's Timber Detective
0:44 to 0:57
Follow Becca and Tom as they search for Gerald, the timber detective.
“teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits.”
Meeting Germany's Timber Detective
1:00 to 1:11
Follow Becca and Tom as they search for Gerald, the timber detective.
Meeting Germany's Timber Detective
1:25 to 3:24
Follow Becca and Tom as they search for Gerald, the timber detective.
“and I don't know about you, But when I think about saving the world's forests, the city of Hamburg isn't what springs to mind.”
Understanding Deforestation Challenges
3:24 to 4:39
Explore the complexities of deforestation and its global impact.
“From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary.”
Papua New Guinea's Forests at Risk
4:39 to 5:40
Learn about the deforestation crisis in Papua New Guinea.
“And what's being done to change the situation?”
The Impact of Logging and Poverty
5:40 to 9:16
Examine the socio-economic factors driving deforestation in PNG.
“I come from a province in Papua New Guinea, which is right on the border with the Papua province of Indonesia.”
The Fight for Land and Rights
9:16 to 11:20
Discover how local communities are navigating land rights issues.
“So that is what is happening in Papua New Guinea at the moment.”
The Role of Global Demand in Deforestation
11:20 to 13:20
Understand how international demand influences illegal logging.
“You know, we were, you know, fighting big people, fighting companies, fighting the government.”
EU Regulations and Illegal Timber
13:20 to 14:01
Explore the weaknesses of EU regulations in combating illegal timber trade.
“In the EU, where I live, there are rules to try and prevent wood that's been cut down illegally from landing on our shelves.”
EU Timber Regulations and Illegal Logging
14:01 to 14:48
Learn about loopholes in EU timber regulations allowing illegal wood imports.
“The EU timber regulation did not cover an important set of derived products from timber and in particular several types of furniture.”
Show all 14 chapters
Impact of Russia's Sanctions on Timber Imports
14:48 to 15:46
Explore how sanctions against Russia are failing to curb timber imports into the EU.
“Russia has launched a major military assault against Ukraine.”
Upcoming EU Regulations: EUDR
15:46 to 17:45
Discover the new European Union Deforestation-Free Regulation and its implications.
“So there are a lot of gaps in the EU's current regulations, the EUTR.”
Timber Detectives: Science and Enforcement
17:45 to 19:12
Meet the scientists ensuring timber compliance and revealing illegal wood origins.
“As they always say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
The Role of Consumers in Timber Sustainability
19:12 to 27:29
Understand how consumer choices can impact timber legality and sustainability.
“I'm Becca Warner and you're listening to Germany's Timber Detectives.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Becca Warner:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:30Becca Warner:No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com.
1:11Dr Gerald Koch:My name is Becca Warner. I'm an environmental journalist based in Berlin. Today, I've travelled north to Hamburg with my producer Tom.
1:25Dr Gerald Koch:Now, this programme's all about deforestation, and I don't know about you, But when I think about saving the world's forests, the city of Hamburg isn't what springs to mind. But there's someone here I really want to meet. A man known as Germany's timber detective.
1:41Becca Warner:So it's through there. There's got to be an entrance around here.
1:45Dr Gerald Koch:Where's the entrance? Do you know what I mean? Like, that's a fence.
1:48Becca Warner:That is a fence.
1:49Dr Gerald Koch:But perhaps appropriately for a detective, he's pretty hard to find.
1:53Becca Warner:Let's go down there. It's awesome.
1:58Dr Gerald Koch:We're walking around the edge of a giant gated compound filled with thousands of tree species from all over the world.
2:05Becca Warner:Well, if we keep going, it's got to be in. There's got to be a way in somewhere. Should we just keep going?
2:11Dr Gerald Koch:Somewhere inside is the man we're trying to find. Gerald! Gerald! Gerald! Is that a sin? Is that a sin? Oh, my God, it's an entrance. Finally, we find a gate hidden in a hedge. Morgan. Hello, what is Holt's biology? Nein. Thank you. There are a few blocky modernist buildings set between the trees. We head for one of them.
2:45Becca Warner:Hello. Excuse me, do you know where Gerald Cottage is? Gerald Cottage. Get out of here. Get out of here. Yes, you're in Gerald Cottage. And yes, this is cute.
2:58Dr Gerald Koch:And eventually we find it.
3:01Becca Warner:I'm so sorry, we have trouble. We walked around quite a lot of trouble. Ah, OK. Yeah, we couldn't find the door. Close here we have an area about nine, nine and a half hectare.
3:11Dr Gerald Koch:It might sound strange, but here in his lab in a suburb of Hamburg, Gerald is actually on the front line of the EU's efforts to stop the trade of illegal wood. From the BBC World Service, this is the documentary.
3:38Dr Gerald Koch:We'll come back to Gagard later. First, I want to understand a bit more about the problem of deforestation and why it's so hard to tackle. Climate justice! Climate justice! No! I've been writing about environmental issues for almost a decade. And in that time, it's felt like more and more people are waking up to the mess we're in. Lots of countries have been introducing more environmental regulations and reducing their emissions. A record number of countries signed the historic Paris Accord to slow global warming. But the world's forests aren't seeing the benefits. In fact, 2024's Forest Declaration assessment showed that global deforestation rates are higher than they were 10 years ago.
4:20Dr Gerald Koch:Another report finds that a lot of these trees are cut down illegally, more than two-thirds of them in some regions.
4:30Dr Gerald Koch:I want to get a better idea of why laws haven't been able to stop such a huge number of trees from being cut down. Why aren't regulations working? And what's being done to change the situation?
4:54Dr Gerald Koch:One of the countries whose forests are considered to be most at risk from illegal deforestation is the huge island nation of Papua New Guinea. More than three quarters of its land is covered by trees, from mangroves on the coast to damp cloud forests in the mountains.
5:13Dr Gerald Koch:These massive forests are home to 7 % of the world's biodiversity, including species that can't be found anywhere else, like types of tree kangaroos and pygmy parrots.
5:28Dr Gerald Koch:But Papua New Guinea is also a major exporter of tropical logs. According to data from Global Forest Watch, nearly 2 million hectares of the country's tree cover has been lost over the last 25 years. My name is Samuel.
5:42Becca Warner:I come from a province in Papua New Guinea, which is right on the border with the Papua province of Indonesia. And we have a lot of forests. And for the last 40 years, there's still so much deforestation going on.
5:58Dr Gerald Koch:Samuel Kimme grew up in Papua New Guinea, but then moved overseas to work with international NGOs helping to protect the world's forests. When he returned to his homeland, he was shocked to see what was happening.
6:10Becca Warner:When I returned back to my province in 2011, what I see was large-scale commercial logging concessions.
6:17Dr Gerald Koch:Papua New Guinea's forests are home to tropical tree species that are especially useful for timber. Around 3 million cubic metres of logs are exported from Papua New Guinea every year. And there's one tree that is particularly sought after.
6:31Becca Warner:The dominant tree species is the quilla tree.
6:35Dr Gerald Koch:Quilla are huge, towering trees and can grow to be two metres across. They're wood known for being durable, so it's often used for outdoor decking and furniture. But it's not just people's appetite for high-end patio dining tables that's driving deforestation in Papua New Guinea. Samwell's also seeing trees cut down for other reasons.
6:55Becca Warner:Since 2015, 16, palm oil more or less emerged out of logging. In my province alone, there is a huge palm oil project, 139 ,000 hectares in all, cliff fell and planted with palm oil.
7:12Dr Gerald Koch:That's the equivalent of almost 200 ,000 football pitches, cleared for palm oil in just one region of Papua New Guinea since 2010. Palm oil makes up more than a third of the world's vegetable oil. You'll often find it in everyday products like packaged food and cosmetics.
7:27Becca Warner:People rely on the forest for water, for food, for building materials, almost everything. And with palm oil removing all that forest cover, it leaves people, you know, empty-handed, bare, naked, helpless.
7:43Dr Gerald Koch:When we talk about illegal deforestation, it's typically the laws of the place where the tree was cut down that determine what's legal or not. The situation's complicated in Papua New Guinea. The government has given the green light to this logging, but investigations by different environmental organisations have concluded that a significant amount of Papua New Guinea's timber is cut down illegally. Samuel explains.
8:06Becca Warner:Papua New Guinea is a very unique country in the sense that 97 % of the land in Papua New Guinea is customary land, meaning that we Papua New Guineans, the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, we own the land. And to own the land meaning that we also own the trees, We also own the minerals. We own almost everything, not the government.
8:26Dr Gerald Koch:Indigenous people's right to ownership of the land is written into Papua New Guinea's constitution. But Papua New Guinea's government is paying people for the rights to this land, then setting up agreements with international logging companies. They come and cut down the trees and pay royalties to the local people. Now, that might all sound legitimate, but the amount of money that Indigenous people receive is often a fraction of the timber's true value.
8:53Becca Warner:The valuable timber, the quilla, is 35 kina per cubic metre. That's what's on the agreement. But on the world market, that same quilla tree is sold at 250 US dollars per cubic.
9:07Dr Gerald Koch:Market prices for quilla wood vary a lot, but based on this price and at the current exchange rate, the amount the local people are receiving for these trees is less than 4 % of their final market value.
9:19Becca Warner:So that is what is happening in Papua New Guinea at the moment.
9:24Dr Gerald Koch:Some people are willing to sell the rights to their land for so little because they have so little, as much as 40 % of Papua New Guinea's population are currently living in poverty.
9:34Becca Warner:People need money. When an opportunity comes for them to sell the trees, they give away that right.
9:41Dr Gerald Koch:But still, if people consent to selling the rights to this timber, Doesn't that make it legal?
Read the full transcript
9:46Becca Warner:If you look at it from an angle of free prior informed consent, that is grossly missing. It is absent. You've got to explain everything in clear terms to the landowners, but it doesn't happen that way.
10:01Dr Gerald Koch:The idea of free prior and informed consent is really important here. It's something required under international law. Reports from organisations, including Global Witness and Chatham House, have found that landowners are not giving this kind of consent in Papua New Guinea. We put this to the Papua New Guinean authorities, but they didn't respond. The Prime Minister, James Marape, talked about the country's forests in a speech to the United Nations in September 2024.
10:28Becca Warner:We sustainably manage our forests, land and sea, because our livelihood depends on them. PNG remains committed to safeguarding both our blue ocean life and our green forest life for
10:42Dr Gerald Koch:its children. But in that same speech he also went on to say however accessing a global climate
10:48Becca Warner:finance continues to be a challenge to Papua New Guinea and many small nations. We call on United Nations to look into this matter or else we can liquidate our forests and marine resources to achieve our development aspirations, especially in a pursuit to alleviate poverty from our people.
11:09Dr Gerald Koch:Samuel is working hard to change things in his country.
11:12Becca Warner:These are the things that we really need to educate our people so that they can rise up and, you know, fight against it.
11:18Dr Gerald Koch:But standing up to the government and big business can be really risky.
11:24Becca Warner:You know, we were, you know, fighting big people, fighting companies, fighting the government. And then I used social media platforms like Facebook, thinking that, OK, the government will see that people are now fighting and exposing everything that we are doing.
11:40Dr Gerald Koch:In 2020, Samuel made a Facebook post that the authorities took issue with, which included some meeting minutes from the local forest management committee. He was arrested for cybercrime.
11:50Becca Warner:They charged me saying that the information that I posted on Facebook was classified information and I was not the right person to disseminate that information or to even put it on social media. I got arrested, ended up in jail, spent five weeks in jail and then after that it took me four years to eventually win the court.
12:12Dr Gerald Koch:Samuel was later acquitted, but he isn't alone in facing arrest for trying to protect the trees. All over the world, environmental defenders often face threats and surveillance, and many lose their life. More than 2 ,000 have been murdered since 2012. The reality is scary, but Samuel says the dangers won't stop him from protecting the forest. Going to court or going to prison still cannot stop me from doing the right thing. But it's not all down to Samuel and activists like him to slow deforestation.
12:45Becca Warner:You see, how can we stop deforestation in Papua New Guinea? We've got to know where PNG timber is ending up.
12:53Dr Gerald Koch:Papua New Guinea's deforestation problem doesn't start and end in Papua New Guinea, because it's the demand for wood in other countries that drives logging in the first place. Around 80 % of Papua New Guinea's timber makes its way north to China.
13:06Becca Warner:My question to them is that from China, where did all that quillate wood go to? If it was converted into furniture, then who ended up buying all the furniture? Is it Europe? Is it America?
13:18Dr Gerald Koch:This is the challenge. There's not enough transparency. In the EU, where I live, there are rules to try and prevent wood that's been cut down illegally from landing on our shelves. But getting regulations in place that really work is easier said than done. To find out why, I decided to speak with Julia Christian. She's an environmental lawyer at the campaigning organisation FERN and an expert on forest policy.
13:41Becca Warner:So in theory, we shouldn't be having any illegal timber sold in the EU. Unfortunately, this has not happened. The EU timber regulation has been too weak in various ways to stop illegal timber from entering the EU. I can give four different reasons.
14:00Becca Warner:Here's the first. The EU timber regulation did not cover an important set of derived products from timber and in particular several types of furniture. So what happened was that you had timber that was being logged illegally in countries like Papua New Guinea. And this would then be sort of rerouted to China in particular or Vietnam, be turned into furniture and then be allowed to enter the EU.
14:24Dr Gerald Koch:So maybe you're sitting on a wooden chair right now. It might say made in China on it, but it could include wood cut down illegally in Papua New Guinea, which seems like a huge oversight. Reason number two.
14:37Becca Warner:It's too easy to say, and companies do it all the time, that timber is coming from somewhere that it's not actually coming from. The biggest source of illegal timber for the EU at the moment is Russia.
14:48Dr Gerald Koch:Hello and welcome to BBC World News. Russia has launched a major military assault against Ukraine. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the EU brought in sanctions on all sorts of Russian imports. Timber was one of them. But there are suspicions that this sanctioned wood has continued to make its way into the EU. The EU sanctions watchdog says there's a high risk that it's travelling into the EU via other countries, where it gets repackaged and relabeled.
15:15Becca Warner:There's a huge amount of timber coming from Russia and Belarus into the EU at the moment, despite these sanctions.
15:22Dr Gerald Koch:Reason number three.
15:23Becca Warner:A third reason is poor enforcement. So there's been quite uneven enforcement at the EU borders of timber shipments. And so it's been a bit of a Swiss cheese situation in terms of timber actually being checked at the borders. And lastly, reason number four. Companies are rarely sanctioned. The sanctions are not high enough. As a result, it's not enough of a disincentive for companies.
15:46Dr Gerald Koch:So there are a lot of gaps in the EU's current regulations, the EUTR. I put this to Marce Beristecchi, a spokesman at the European Commission. He said, quote,
16:20Becca Warner:insufficient checks and uneven enforcement across member states.
16:23Dr Gerald Koch:But new and improved regulation is on the way later this year, following some delays. It's called the European Union Deforestation-Free Regulation, or EUDR.
16:33Becca Warner:Marche says, quote, The regulation marks a turning point in the global fight against deforestation and forest degradation by addressing both legal and illegal deforestation. The EUDR contains new provisions strengthening cooperation and enforcement. It creates due diligence and strict traceability obligations for companies to clean their supply chains from products associated with deforestation and forest degradation.
16:59Dr Gerald Koch:So it sounds like the new EUDR regulations will be an upgrade. Julia Christian explains a bit more about what to expect.
17:06Becca Warner:One of the biggest changes is that now timber needs to not only be produced legally, it also cannot have caused deforestation and forest degradation, even if that was legal in the country where it was produced. So that's quite a big change. There's improved higher percentage of checks at the border, higher sanctions for companies as well if they're found to be in violation. There's increased coverage of derived products. There's better coverage of furniture, for example, in the EUDR. And then finally, which is very important, there is a requirement that all products, whether it's timber or flooring or furniture, all of them must be accompanied by a geolocation polygon tag and then have proof of traceability back to that polygon.
17:44Becca Warner:And that's really to stop the problem of laundering and fraud.
17:51Becca Warner:As they always say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I think if there's a single thing that would help, it would be more transparency in the supply chain.
18:01Dr Gerald Koch:And that's why I'm here in this leafy district of Hamburg at the Thunen Institute. Here, Gerald and his team are shining that sunlight on timber imports. They're using science to help figure out which pieces of wood entering the EU are legal and which are suspect.
18:19Dr Gerald Koch:This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.
18:28Becca Warner:Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.
19:01Becca Warner:So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts.
19:06Dr Gerald Koch:Thank you. Bye.
19:12Dr Gerald Koch:I'm Becca Warner and you're listening to Germany's Timber Detectives.
19:17Becca Warner:You will see this higher temperature and humidity.
19:23Dr Gerald Koch:Gergard knows his trees. He's showing us around some amazing lofty greenhouses where trees from all over the world are happily growing high above us.
19:32Becca Warner:Now we have very important tropical timber.
19:36Dr Gerald Koch:In his laboratory next door, he and his team spend their days looking closely at samples of wood to check they match their papers. This paperwork has been a requirement since 2013 and should stay exactly where the wood has come from. But it's not always correct. Armed with microscopes and an encyclopedic knowledge of the world's trees, this team of scientists have become known as the timber detectives. How would you describe your job, your remit at the Institute?
20:05Becca Warner:Yes, we are scientists, very well experienced in wood identification. During the last year, more and more the question of work is dealing with this control of legal, illegal timber to control the trading.
20:18Dr Gerald Koch:Gergald shows us into his story.
20:21Becca Warner:And this room represented the most important 400 to 600 sourcements which are regulated. Here we can show what's happened on the international market. But you are impressed. We call it doublets because we have several specimens.
20:38Dr Gerald Koch:I am impressed. We're surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shells filled with hundreds of wooden objects. There are guitars and oars and what look like wooden bowling balls. Some of the wooden objects here are thousands of years old.
20:50Becca Warner:Many, many stories here. There was one here from this old pyramid. This is more than 3 ,500 years old, this woodblock, used in the pyramids. And we identified for the archologists and it was acacia.
21:04Dr Gerald Koch:Over the years, companies, government authorities and private collectors have sent these objects in to check their origin. Gergaard and his team's analysis has found that almost 20 % of the wood samples don't match their paperwork. So how do they figure this out? We head to his lab.
21:24Dr Gerald Koch:On the way there, we walk past all the items that are being tested today. They're laid out on a long table. Incense sticks, paintbrushes, ukuleles, a backgammon set. Gerghal cuts small chunks from each object, and we take them down the hallway to the lab for testing.
21:39Becca Warner:Yes, now we are here in our wood atomic laboratory. Here the work starts.
21:45Dr Gerald Koch:He takes the block over to a stovetop and puts it in what looks like a saucepan so he can boil it.
21:50Becca Warner:The first step is to cook the material. Cooking, why not cooking the material? To get a more homogeneous structure and also we remove the air. But the first step is soften. Once it's soft, he can cut it into wafer-thin slices. You take your hand, you experience a very robust machine with a very sharp knife. and by sliding you can hear it, then the knife will cut in the prepared direction. The machine cuts the wood like salami into delicate slices thinner than paper.
22:20Dr Gerald Koch:He very carefully transfers one slice to a glass slide and puts it under a microscope.
22:25Becca Warner:But now we can observe it and you can do it here. Then you can see all interval cell types. Done now in a few minutes or seconds.
22:35Dr Gerald Koch:It's so beautiful. All I can see are mesmerising lines and wiggles in a jumble of uneven circles. Thankfully, Gerald knows what he's doing. He can tell straight away which tree species we're seeing.
22:49Becca Warner:Here we can directly recognise or identify the timber, because it's very distinct that it's an oak, that we can clearly confirm an oak.
22:58Dr Gerald Koch:It's clear that Gerald's got a whole reference library in his head. But for trickier cases, the team have a literal reference library, made of wood, known as a xylotech. OK,
23:10Becca Warner:here we have our big treasure in this very special moving storage system. Yes, this is our references for macroscopic samples. About 25 ,000 specimens we have documented.
23:25Dr Gerald Koch:The collection was started over a century ago and has been passed on and added to by the Institute.
23:29Becca Warner:But very important for us. It's a living library, we say. We use it regularly, daily for our works.
23:35Dr Gerald Koch:So you must recognize, you must have a clue when you see that species once you've shaved it.
23:40Becca Warner:It's the best computer, it's your brain. You've got that library in your head. Yeah, right. And now people say my job will be substituted by artificial intelligence. I don't believe it, but it could be, it must be done to transfer our knowledge, to control illegal logging. But we also say we are the wood detectives.
23:57Dr Gerald Koch:And what happens once you've identified something not matching its own certification? what's the next steps and the consequences?
24:06Becca Warner:We as a scientist we prepare the official report normally we send our results to the authorities
24:11Dr Gerald Koch:And what do they then do with them?
24:14Becca Warner:They look what's happened if there was some illegal logging or they expect illegal logging then it could be a case for a court
24:21Dr Gerald Koch:For a court really? Yeah right
24:23Becca Warner:If there was a customs case of illegal logging then it could be possible that we work with customs and directly with police
24:32Dr Gerald Koch:If we want legislation on deforestation to be effective, we need scientists like Gerald to root out the truth about the wood that's being imported. His detective work helps make sure the rules are enforced. And there are signs that it's working. The number of wrongfully declared wood samples has gone down since 2013, from roughly 35 % to below 20 % today.
24:54Becca Warner:In our opinion, it's a very important job to support NGOs and others to look at what's happened on the international market, how we can save the forest. I think this is a very important natural resource, but it must be used under sustainable and legal conditions.
25:09Dr Gerald Koch:Still, as we've heard, the problem of illegal deforestation hasn't gone away. Hopefully, the new EU regulations will help. This regulation was actually due to come into effect last year, but it was delayed. I asked Maciej Berestecchi of the European Commission why. He said, quote,
25:49Dr Gerald Koch:The new EUDR regulations are due to be implemented starting in December 2025. But some EU member states are asking for further delays and for the rules to be simplified. Agricultural ministers from 18 EU member states recently wrote a joint letter stating that, quote, the full traceability within the EU market required for all commodities by the regulation will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for some producers, end quote. According to reports, they have concerns that some European producers might be forced to relocate abroad to avoid any additional costs of complying with the rules.
26:34Dr Gerald Koch:it's easy to feel helpless while global institutions work out how to protect the forests so i asked environmental lawyer julia christian if in the meantime there's anything everyday people like us can do to help the situation well the first thing i would say is just buy less
26:48Becca Warner:just buy less furniture try to keep what you already have buy something that will last don't go for the trends, which mean you need to replace your furniture in five years. If you need to buy new, ask the person who's selling the furniture, where did the wood come from? If they don't know, then that's, I think, a red flag. I wouldn't buy from there.
27:09Dr Gerald Koch:Our appetite for wood isn't going anywhere, especially in today's era of fast furniture. As long as governments and businesses can get away with cutting down trees that they shouldn't, it seems that that is often what they'll continue to do. Our planet's forests matter more than ever. They're a much-needed home for plants and fungi and animals and people. And if we're to slow the climate crisis, we can't do it without huge, healthy forests. Only time will tell if the EU's new regulations will do what they're supposed to. But as regulations tighten, so must their enforcement. And that will depend not only on the work of individual activists and scientists, but also the steering hand of big business and governments.
27:49Dr Gerald Koch:Getting this right will be crucial if we're to prevent the world's most valuable forests from disappearing.
28:01Dr Gerald Koch:You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. The producer was Tom Pooley. Original music also by Tom Pooley. And it was a 4Kicks production.
From the publisher
On the outskirts of Hamburg, Dr Gerald Koch is surrounded by wooden objects - chairs, board games, paint brushes - ready for inspection. His team of scientists at the Thünen Institute of Wood Research are known as the timber detectives. They spend their days putting wood samples under the microscope to find out where they've come from, and if they’re suspect.
Berlin based environmental journalist Becca Warner explores the ongoing problem of illegal deforestation.
Why is it proving so hard to tackle, despite tightening EU regulations? What are the consequences for those living in Papua New Guinea where much of this timber originates? And what makes this group of German scientists so important in the battle to protect the world’s forests?
Presenter: Becca Warner Producer: Tom Pooley
A 4 kicks production for the BBC World Service.
Image: Gerald Koch and Becca Warner inspect timber samples (Credit: Tom Pooley)
This programme has been edited for clarity.
