Abstract
Forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven by factors such as fire, mining and illegal logging. The Brazilian government has implemented control mechanisms to combat illegal timber extraction that have positively impacted deforestation rates. Under these regulations, all wood products, from raw logs to processed lumber, must be registered in control systems before transportation. This allows analysis of wood products transported between companies over time. However, the existence of three partially integrated control systems complicates a full analysis of the timber market. This study integrates data from these systems to create timber trade networks, which help identify companies or groups operating outside expected standards. We also propose a method to trace likely supply chains of timber companies, addressing long-standing government concerns about timber traceability. Among the results, we show that certain timber trade networks have components that operate without connections with licensed forests, suggesting that unregistered timber is input into those components, which is illegal. Additionally, we illustrate how supply chain analysis can considerably enhance customer confidence in the legality of purchased timber products.
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Data availability
The SINAFLOR database is available from the IBAMA public data portal: https://dadosabertos.ibama.gov.br/dataset/dof-transportes-de-produtos-florestais. Data from SISFLORA-PA and SISFLORA-MT were obtained through collaborative agreements with environmental regulatory bodies of Pará and Mato Grosso states and are not publicly available. The integrated transportation data for Ipe obtained as a result of this work are available via GitHub at https://github.com/lgnonato/Timber-Chain. Owing to the terms of the agreement made with the regulatory body of Mato Grosso, the released data do not include timber companies and transportation in the Mato Grosso state. For possible access to the complete dataset, please contact www.imaflora.org/.
Code availability
The code to build the TTN of Ipe and compute supply chains is available via GitHub at https://github.com/lgnonato/Timber-Chain.
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Acknowledgements
We thank R. Contreras, D. de Almeida, J. Mattos, J. M. Cardoso da Silva and F. Nunes da Silva for their contribution in the early stages of data preparation and database construction. We thank IMAFLORA for its financial and technical support. This work was also partially supported by CNPq (grant nos. 307184/2021-8 (L.G.N.) and 311144/2022-5 (J.P.)), FAPESP (grant nos. 2022/09091-8 (L.G.N.) and 2021/07012-0 (J.P.)), FAPERJ (grant no. E-26/201.424/2021 (J.P.)) and FGV/EMAp (J.P.). The opinions, hypotheses, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this material are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect CNPq, FAPESP, FAPERJ and FGV views.
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All authors contributed extensively to the work presented in this paper. V.R., B.C., F.M.-V., G.T. and O.B.d.J. implemented the database integration, wrote the supply chain code and ran most of the experiments. R.V. designed the data integration and collected the SINAFLOR data. M.L., J.P. and L.G.N. designed the experiments and analysed the results. R.V., M.L. and L.G.N. wrote the paper and prepared it for submission.
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Nature Sustainability thanks Mohammad Reza Ghaffariyan, Franco Perazzoni and Niels Soendergaard for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Sections 1–3, Figs. 1 and 2, Table 1 and Algorithm 1.
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Nonato, L.G., Russo, V., Costa, B. et al. Assessing timber trade networks and supply chains in Brazil. Nat Sustain 8, 215–220 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01491-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01491-8
