Véronique Laury, Peter Agnefjäll, the CEO and President of IKEA, and Jérôme Bédier, Deputy CEO Carrefour, have joined forces and written to Karmenu Vella, the European Commissioner for Environment. They are calling for trade in illegally–sourced timber to be stopped.
The three businesses have joined forces before, when they successfully campaigned to get legislation introduced to prevent illegal timber being traded in Europe. Unfortunately, whilst the legislation was introduced it could go further to achieve what it was intended to do. In some cases, the uneven administrative and financial burden of compliance in Member States, has actually accentuated unfair market distortion and competition. Right now politicians have an opportunity to fix the timber regulation, which could stamp out the illegal timber market in Europe once and for all.
Given the important role forests can play in providing a climate solution, the trio of signatories are also calling for sustainable forest management to be made central to Europe’s future low carbon society.
The letter is being shared with EU media to rally support for our call. This activity is the pre-cursor to our sponsorship of a timber event hosted in the European Parliament next week by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), at which Richard Gillies, our Sustainability Director will keynote.
Download Kingfisher at a glance PDF 596kb
