A new study by researchers at the Wyss Academy for Nature finds that the EU Timber Regulation was followed by a sharp rise in forest loss in the countries most reliant on EU trade – a cautionary signal as Europe extends the same approach to more commodities.

In 2010, the European Union set out to keep illegally harvested timber off its shelves. The EU Timber Regulation (EUTR), in force from 2013, required importers to verify that the wood they bought was legally cut, with the aim of weakening the market for illegal logging and easing pressure on forests in producer countries. A new study suggests it may have done the opposite in many of the places it was meant to help.

The research, by Stefano Jud and Quynh Nguyen of the Wyss Academy for Nature and the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern, draws on forest-loss and timber-trade data for 161 countries from 2001 to 2019.

What the study found

Using a difference-in-differences design, the authors compared countries that depended on the EU as their main timber export market before the regulation with countries less exposed to it. In the trade-dependent group, forest loss after the EUTR was on average 52.4% higher than it would have been without the regulation – an estimated 272,640 square kilometers of additional forest loss between 2010 and 2019, an area comparable to Burkina Faso or New Zealand. The loss of primary forest, the mature, carbon-rich, and biodiversity-rich forest that is hardest to replace, was 39.8% higher.

One distinction carries weight here: the finding concerns forest loss outside the EU. It does not mean the regulation failed to reduce illegal-timber imports into Europe itself, which was its domestic purpose.

“It’s a little bit paradoxical,” says Stefano Jud, a postdoctoral researcher at the Wyss Academy and the study’s lead author, “but a green policy can actually increase forest loss in certain countries.”

Why a forest-protection rule backfired

To understand the pattern, the researchers paired the statistical analysis with seven in-depth interviews with people across the timber trade – importers, exporters, producer associations, officials, and civil-society experts in Switzerland, Ukraine, China, Malaysia, and Ghana – conducted between December 2024 and January 2025.

A consistent picture emerged. Faced with the cost and risk of proving each shipment legal, EU importers grew wary of suppliers in countries with weak governance – often not because those suppliers were breaking the law, but because the reliable documentation needed to tell compliant producers apart was missing. Rather than assess individual producers, many importers withdrew from entire countries they judged too risky. Across the trade-dependent group, the share of timber exports going to the EU fell by about 15 percentage points, with the steepest declines in the countries with the weakest rule of law, the highest corruption, and the lowest state capacity.

Shut out of the European market, exporters adapted in two ways, both costly for forests. Many redirected timber to less regulated markets, China most of all. And some sidestepped the timber rules altogether by clearing forest for agriculture, which the regulation did not cover. In the affected countries, forest loss from both forestry and shifting agriculture rose by roughly 31%.

The costs, Jud notes, fall first on nature and then on the smallest producers. Larger firms can absorb new compliance demands; smallholders often cannot, lacking either knowledge of the rules or the formal papers to prove that their land and their timber are legal – they hold no formal title to land their families have worked for generations. Shut out of legal markets, their choices narrow.

A warning for the next generation of rules

The timing gives the findings weight. The EU is now rolling out its Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which extends the same logic of due diligence and market-access conditions to cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, and wood, alongside carbon-related trade measures such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The authors’ concern is that the new rule inherits the old one’s design rather than fixing it. “The EU treated this as an enforcement problem, not a design problem,” says Jud. “So they built a more powerful version of the same rule.”

The EUDR does close one loophole. Because it now covers farm commodities as well as timber, clearing forest to grow crops no longer escapes the regulation. But in the authors' reading, it leaves the two forces that drove the timber result intact: importers still assessing risk country by country rather than producer by producer, and trade still flowing to less demanding markets. The remedies the authors point to are the ones the timber rule never offered – capacity building and technical assistance for smaller producers, verification at the producer level so that compliant suppliers are not shut out along with the rest of their country, and international coordination so that trade cannot simply move to laxer markets.

Designing rules that support, not just demand

The work comes from the Environmental Governance Research Team at the Wyss Academy for Nature, which studies how rules at local, national, and global levels help or hinder both nature and the people who depend on it. For the Wyss Academy, that question plays out on the ground: it works in many of the producer-country landscapes where these supply chains begin, and findings like these shape how it helps local partners meet new trade requirements – such as the EUDR – without being pushed out of legal markets or into clearing more forest.

The broader lesson reaches past timber. When powerful markets impose ambitious rules on weaker partners without the means to meet them, they can drive avoidance rather than reform – and forests, along with the people who depend on them, absorb the cost. The harder task, for the rules now taking shape, is to design them so that protection and livelihoods advance together rather than at each other's expense.

Text: Predrag Tripkovic