“American Hardwood Assured” Deforestation-Free Platform Launches
How is your company handling customer requests for harvest locations? For many exporters, the idea of coming up with exact GPS coordinates for origins of wood products, and assurance that they are deforestation-free, is an impossible task. After two years of development, the American Hardwood Export Council has launched a system that will allow U.S. companies to easily provide county-level GPS coordinates and a statement of deforestation-free origin for our hardwood products. That system, American Hardwood Assured (AHA), launched at the end of July in a limited release to AHEC members.
Now, the American Hardwood Assured platform is available free of charge to any U.S.-based company engaged in the American hardwood export trade. Additional information and registration is available at www.hardwood.us, AHA’s new online home. The site has instructions on how to sign up and use the platform along with a range of online training materials. AHEC is also available to help provide a walkthrough for your company on how to use the platform. For more information, please contact International Program Manager, Tripp Pryor (tpryor@ahec.org).
The platform is designed to provide exporters with a straightforward procedure to quickly prepare standardized AHA Statements with each consignment containing the data needed to confirm negligible risk of illegal harvesting and deforestation at the original source of the hardwood. Users are provided with a point-and-click tool to select the specific U.S. counties where the logs contained in their export consignments are harvested. From this, a separate GeoJSON file is generated containing the geolocation data required for EUDR conformance by overseas customers. This system will also allow you to produce this data for shipments already on the water or delivered earlier this year.
This platform was demonstrated at the Interzum show in Cologne in May and feedback from importers during the latest round of consultations has been almost universally positive, with most stating the legal and
deforestation-free assurance provided by the AHA Statements goes well beyond the requirements of EUDR. A few final tweaks are now being made to the AHA platform based on feedback from the most recent round of consultations with EU importers. Eventually, this system will be opened to international companies and shipments will be tracked on a blockchain.
The legality assurance is underpinned by one of the most comprehensive series of assessments of the risk of illegal harvesting ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
Thirty-three individual assessments, one for each of the U.S. states producing commercial volumes of hardwood, have been prepared so far. Following a rigorous process of independent analysis, stakeholder consultation, and peer review, the team of forest governance experts, appointed by AHA, confirmed a negligible risk of illegal activity in all 37 states – which collectively account for over 99 percent of all commercial hardwood harvesting in the United States.
The deforestation risk assessment underpinning the platform at launch draws on an AI-based assessment of forest and other land-use changes identified by comparing the USDA Crop Data Layer (CDL) for 2024 with 2020. The CDL is itself compiled from a nationwide annual assessment of Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite images prepared by the US Department of Agriculture each year. AHA is developing an innovative “Expert Eye” procedure to refine the AI-based assessments by bringing expert eyes to bear on higher resolution satellite data at sites flagged as a potential deforestation risk. This unique feature promises to provide one of the most accurate quantitative assessments of deforestation risk in any commodity sector anywhere in the world.
AHEC is now reviewing a first draft of an expert legal opinion commissioned to provide legal backing, under EU law, of the AHA’s provision of geolocations of U.S. counties rather than plots within individual properties in the context of forest products from demonstrably negligible risk jurisdictions. AHA will publish a statement summarizing the legal opinion at the AHA website and each AHA Statement will provide a link to this statement. The legal opinion will also be used in support of on-going AHA communication in the European and wider global marketplace.
