What are the impacts of illegal logging?
Whereas sustainable logging can be a long-term source of income for people and the government, logging is often not carried out in accordance to such standards. This has a number of wide-ranging impacts, including fragmentation of species habitat and significant financial losses. Because the terms for forest concessions are short, companies have few incentives to replant trees or harvest efficiently. The strategy is to obtain as much profit as possible in the available timeframe, leaving many damaged areas that will take years to recover.3 Patches of Amazon rainforest are often sold off as large concessions to firms at prices that are far below their market value. What follows is a rushed effort to maximize yield and profit as fast as possible. Little consideration is given to safeguard timber stocks for future harvests, and this leads to the usual litany of biodiversity loss, over-hunting of wildlife and subsequent conversion for agriculture or pasture.
