Key findings

• Ikea, the world's biggest furniture retailer, has for years sold children's furniture made from wood linked to vast illegal logging in protected forests in Russia, an Earthsight investigation has found. It is one of a number of western firms linked to the case.
• The brand's popular Sundvik children's range – which includes chairs, tables, beds and wardrobes – and Flisat doll's house are among the items likely tainted with illegal wood. Earthsight estimates that shoppers have been purchasing an Ikea product containing the suspect Russian lumber somewhere on earth every two minutes.
• Using undercover meetings, visits to logging sites, satellite imagery analysis and scrutiny of official documents, court records and customs data, we traced wood furniture on sale in Ikea stores around the world to forests in remote Siberia. They're controlled by companies owned by one of Russia's top-50 wealthiest politicians, Evgeny Bakurov.
• Our year-long investigation found that Bakurov's businesses broke numerous forestry and environmental laws. Illegal deals helped them harvest 2.16 million cubic metres of wood in protected forests over the last decade. Piled high, the logs produced would rival the Great Pyramid of Giza.
• Loggers felled millions of trees on the false pretext they were dead, dying, diseased or damaged – what's known as sanitary felling. Sick trees are often used as an excuse to flout Russia's logging laws.
• Bakurov's pine was certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading global scheme for sustainable wood products, and shipped to an Indonesian manufacturer which supplies Ikea stores in countries including the US, UK, Germany, France and other European countries. Bakurov also supplied the retail giant through middlemen in Russia and China.
• Bakurov's tainted wood is also in many other supply chains heading to Europe and the US, aside from Ikea's. A majority of the EU's imports from eastern Russia are potentially contaminated.
• Earthsight holds FSC largely responsible for the logging abuses linked to Ikea and other retailers we connected to the scandal. They rely on the green label and its competitor PEFC to ensure their supplies are sustainable and legally sourced. Our findings provide further proof that this trust is wildly misplaced.
• FSC audits did not mention the rampant illegal logging documented by Earthsight and Russian authorities. Instead, high-risk wood continued to be sold in Ikea stores year after year.
• The findings show that governments in the US and Europe must enforce timber import laws more rigorously to address their roles in driving global deforestation.
• Ikea, which denies wrongdoing, announced a temporary ban on sanitary felled wood from Siberia and the Russian Far East after Earthsight got in touch. The retailer insists Bakurov's wood was "legally harvested" – but recently dropped his companies as suppliers, citing unspecified "practices of concern".

Prologue

The noise was deafening: a lumbering, wood-munching machine carving through the forest like a knife through butter. Trees in the Siberian province of Irkutsk Oblast had grown slowly, weathering biting winds and frozen winters for over a century. Under the mechanical grip of the Ponsse CTL harvester, they fell within seconds.

As the half-million-dollar machine automatically stripped the trunks of branches and sawed them into logs, Evgeny Bakurov looked on with satisfaction. Heavyset with closely cropped hair, the 44-year-old has the appearance of a heavyweight boxer. The rare visit into the taiga, to the forefront of his logging operation, made a welcome distraction from his usual milieu, hobnobbing with local business leaders and posing for photo-ops.

Control of an area of forest the size of Greater London has given him plenty. His own private helicopter, a boat named after his daughter, multiple properties and an income putting him in the top 50 highest-earning politicians or bureaucrats in Russia.

It has not been easy. Extracting profit from these woods is hard – or at least it would be, if you followed the law, which is supposed to ensure that rights to log are sold competitively at auction, that logging rates remain sufficiently low to allow the slow-growing forest to recover, and that the most ecologically important tracts are kept largely off limits.

But Bakurov, a businessman-politician whose macho image and penchant for martial arts draw obvious comparisons to the Russian President he so admires, has learned not to worry about the law. For over the course of a long career, Bakurov has mastered the tricks of his trade, which in the world of Russian forestry have little to do with efficient business practices. It is about cultivating allies. A few campaign donations can go a long way.

In his case this is hardly a secret. His companies left a long paper trail laying bare widespread illegal logging, including in protected forests.

Finding a market for all this wood, with the nearest coast a thousand miles away, has also been challenging. Doubly so given its illegal origin. But Bakurov has had a couple of powerful corporate allies overseas too, from distant Sweden and Bonn.

Thanks to them, it turns out, a trail leads from Bakurov's remote Siberian forest destruction to children's bedrooms all over the world. It is part of millions of people's 'Wonderful Everyday'.

Lawless logging

Razing forests without anyone noticing used to be easy in Irkutsk province. It is remote, with few roads snaking into the seemingly endless taiga. Until recently, guard posts like the illegal ones Bakurov set up to block access to the forest leases controlled by his companies Vilis and Vertical-B were enough to keep unwanted eyes at bay. Not anymore. The dawn of publicly available court papers and high-quality satellite imagery make it impossible for illegal deforesters to hide their activities.

Drawing on these and other sources as well as our own field investigations, Earthsight established that Bakurov's companies have been systematically flouting environmental and forestry laws for years.

The argument made worldwide is that logging can be made 'sustainable' and not damaging to forests or the wider environment long term, so long as strict rules are followed. In keeping with this, Russia has detailed regulations limiting licensed logging. The volumes allowed to be harvested in a given area each year – the 'annual allowable cut' or AAC – are carefully controlled. The most important areas of forest for the environment or wildlife within a given lease area are placed off limits. Logging methods must follow strict parameters in order to reduce damage to surrounding forests and soils. Loggers must dispose of their waste carefully. They must also take specific actions to promote regrowth: sowing seeds, planting seedlings and leaving some mature seeding trees standing.

Our evidence shows that all five of Bakurov's logging firms – Vilis, Vertical-B, DeepForest, Noviy Les and Bratskwood – have systematically flouted every one of these rules.

Vast tracts of protected woodlands were illegally felled under the false pretext that the trees were diseased or dying. Doubly-protected trees along the banks of rivers and lakes, critical for fish-spawning and erosion control, were clear-cut in their hundreds of thousands. Forests were turned into tinderboxes by the illegal abandonment of huge volumes of logging residues. Riverbanks and shorelines were torn to pieces with heavy machinery. Almost none of the required steps to promote regrowth were carried out.

The overall scene resembles a Russian nesting doll of illegal logging, where dodgy deals unravel and reveal crimes inside crimes inside crimes.

Why the lease changes were illegal

Under Russian law, you can't chop down a forest just because a bureaucrat lets you.

Click here to read more

What may sound like a dry legal dispute was, in environmental terms, a disaster. The additional agreements, agreed between September 2012 and July 2018 and covering eight different forest leases, essentially permitted a logging free-for-all across 132,000 hectares of woodland – 85 per cent (111,700 hectares) of which was protected forest.

The deals broke forestry laws by allowing an additional 689,000 cubic metres of timber to be harvested over a short period of time, far more than the roughly 90,000 cubic metres per year allowed originally (of which 40,000 cubic metres was unprofitable 'thinning' of small trees – see table above). Nearly all the added harvest would come from nominally 'protected' forests.

With the illegal additional lease agreements signed, all pretence of responsible forest management went out of the window. The deals permitted a huge expansion of logging, overwhelmingly in the form of clear-cuts and other extensive harvesting said to be needed to save protected trees.

One reason they were clearing forest along these fragile shorelines illegally was as a cheap means of transporting their logs out of the forest. Rather than transport the logs by the established logging roads as required by law, which was difficult and expensive, particularly during the muddy summer months, Bakurov's firms made systematic use of the neighbouring rivers and reservoir instead. Miles of precious shoreline was ripped apart by heavy machinery, as tens of thousands of logs were violently dragged across it to waiting barges.

Bakurov's firms were caught red-handed in such illegality multiple times. On three separate occasions during 2018-2019, Bratsk environmental prosecutors took logging firms operating under contract in Bakurov's leases to court for such breaches. The records show that field inspections by the authorities revealed numerous cases where shorelines had been torn up, littered with logging debris and polluted with engine oil.

Wasteland

Squinting at satellite photos taken from hundreds of miles above the earth wasn't enough. In September 2020 Earthsight visited logging sites within protected forests controlled by Bakurov's companies to witness the destruction for ourselves. We travelled to six sites in Irkutsk's Bratsk and Ust-Udinskiy districts, unearthing yet more violations of environmental and logging laws.

We saw no signs of sickness or pests on stumps that survived sanitary clear-cutting. Nor were neighbouring forest stands visibly weak, dead or dying. In fact, valuable conifers had been chopped down while cheaper species were left untouched. Dead trees which should be priorities for felling and removal during real sanitary logging had also been left standing.

Visiting sites of illegal deforestation along the shores of Bratsk reservoir, we found them strewn with equipment, machinery and vehicles. Vehicle tracks and log piles littered the scene. Along the reservoir, man-made embankments served as temporary berths for loading wood onto barges and the loggers had even set up a parking lot. In one illegal clearance almost a kilometre long along the shore of the lake, we found it pockmarked along its length with channels cutting up to three metres deep into the fragile soil down which logs had been dragged.

In logging site after logging site, we found the ground littered with dead logging residues such as discarded branches and destroyed undergrowth. Illegal abandonment of such residues in the manner seen leads to much greater fire risk. If the forest concerned had indeed been infested with pests and disease as claimed, such illegal behaviour by loggers also promotes further spread and undermines the very purpose of the harvesting.

Earthsight's field visits also confirm that the companies Bakurov controls are systematically failing in their legal obligations to help forests grow back once loggers have left. Such 'reforestation' activities are commonly cited by Bakurov publicly as evidence that his activities don't harm the forest or wildlife in the long-term. Though sometimes seen as relative technicalities, they are a crucial part of the wider logic which the forestry sector uses to justify logging and paint it as environmentally friendly.

Yet arbitration court files contain evidence of his firms skipping some of their required reforestation duties, trying to avoid them and, in some cases, falsely stating that they had performed them. Bakurov's firms have been repeatedly fined as a result. In one case in 2017, to the tune of 5 million roubles ($84,000). Our field checks suggest that these cases are the tip of the iceberg, with failures of this kind standard practice in forests under Bakurov's control.

New friends, new tricks

One likely reason that Bakurov was able to stay ahead of the authorities longer is his powerful political and government connections. But by 2019, his allies were starting to suffer the consequences of colluding with businessmen such as him, and his position was beginning to look increasingly precarious.

First came the downfall of the Irkutsk forest minister Sergey Sheverda in early June 2019, for his role in illegally approving sanitary felling of healthy forest in a nature reserve. Prominent regional political observers immediately and publicly raised Bakurov's name in relation to the case, and local press reports also alleged the involvement of his firms, though Earthsight could find no evidence to support this.

Less than a month later, his boss was also in trouble, again with a forest-related connection. Floods hit Irkutsk in late June and early July, displacing tens of thousands, killing at least 18 people and hitting the headlines nationwide. Local press reports alleged that the illegal logging of coastal protection zones – including by Bakurov – had contributed to the devastation. Greenpeace Russia's forest chief agreed that suspect 'pseudo-sanitary' felling had likely contributed.

The response brought the region to the attention of the Kremlin. Irkutsk's top official, Governor Sergey Levchenko – a key Bakurov ally – came under growing criticism for his poor response to the disaster, and in December 2019 was finally sacked.

With his key allies out of office and illegal sanitary logging in the state garnering unprecedented attention among the public and even as far as Moscow, the net began closing in on Evgeny Bakurov. The flow of dodgy lease amendments stopped and within a year of the floods and Sheverda's downfall logging was finally brought to a halt by the courts in seven of Bakurov's eight remaining illegal amendments. The last one was finally halted, two years too late, in February 2021. Earthsight's satellite eye-in-the-sky confirmed that the party appeared to be over.

A lesser man might have taken defeat gracefully. After all, though officials had been arrested, sacked or jailed, Bakurov and his companies had pocketed millions and suffered little more than the odd minor fine. He could have rested on his laurels, sat back and enjoyed his new-found wealth. But that would be to underestimate Evgeny Bakurov. Instead, he was quick to cultivate new friends and invent new tricks.

When his long-term ally Levchenko was sacked by Putin in December 2019, Bakurov moved quickly to befriend his replacement. When acting Governor Igor Kobzev looked to confirm his position in the legislative elections of September 2020, timber companies owned or closely linked to Bakurov were among the most generous contributors to his campaign. Records show they supplied 12 million roubles ($160,000), 10 per cent of the total funds raised.

As well as a new ally, Bakurov also has a new trick. With the sanitary logging scam providing an increasingly difficult route to riches, Russia's illegal timber barons have hit on a new scheme: Priority Investment Projects (PIPs).

The PIP scheme was designed to promote downstream processing in the Russian wood industry but has evolved into a scam which logging companies illegally abuse to gain cheap access to forests and benefit from state subsidies. One such project was at the heart of Russia's largest illegal timber scandal this century, which occurred in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. As Earthsight documented in an explosive report, in 2019 Russia's domestic spy agency blew the lid on the case, arresting the timber baron involved. Prosecutors alleged that his company wood processing facility was a sham, used to cover the illegal harvesting of some 600,000 cubic metres of logs. The man in charge of Khabarovsk's forest industry during the height of the scam was found guilty of abuse of office in 2020 as a result. The timber baron behind the scam also admitted paying bribes to a federal official in Moscow.

In response to the scandal, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered his government to strengthen state oversight of priority projects. But with key decisions remaining in the gift of local officials, the opportunity for graft remained.

In December 2020, two months after his successful election, one such official, Irkutsk governor Kobzev, announced three new forest-related Priority Investment Projects for his region. One of those projects, it later emerged, has been given to Bakurov-owned timber firm Angri LLC, one of those generous political donors. The project will bring with it the rights to cut 422,300 cubic metres of timber – or approximately 700,000 trees – each and every year.

Not so remote

The dense coniferous forests of Irkutsk are about as remote as it gets. To the south stretch the vast empty deserts of Mongolia. To the north, an unbroken expanse of wilderness touches the frozen Arctic. From Bratsk, the nearest open water port is more than 1,600 miles away; Moscow another 800 miles, across a mountain range and five time zones.

It is not a place you would expect to be well-connected to the outside world. And on the face of it, for Bakurov's little timber empire, this would appear to be true. His companies process few of the trees they cut. Most are sold to local wood product manufacturers. The exports he does have are to nearby China.

Yet ours is a globalised world, and the tentacles of big business reach even its remotest corners. As it turns out, there are threads connecting Bakurov's business to every part of the planet – and to one of its biggest corporate names.

The first big clue to how to trace these threads came from Bakurov himself. A promotional video for his firms published on YouTube in 2016 shows him brag of supplying none other than the largest wood product retailer in the world: Ikea. He said the multibillion-dollar brand had initiated the relationship some years earlier, and claimed the Swedish giant was particularly pleased with his ability to deliver the goods. "After seven years of Ikea's work in Russia with logging companies," Bakurov claimed the retailer had told him, "we chose your company because you send logs faster than we can transfer the money."

Going undercover

In that same promo film, Bakurov claimed to supply wood to factories near the Chinese port city of Qingdao, whose main customer is Ikea. While initially the wood ending up with Ikea was leaving Russia as logs, he also claimed to have persuaded the Swedish firm to support the setting up of a sawmill in Russia to do primary processing there.

But it remained uncertain which Ikea products were concerned, and which Chinese factories were making them. It was also possible that the business relationship had since broken down, perhaps because of the court cases and media reports revealing wrongdoing by his firms. Or perhaps Bakurov was simply lying.

Earthsight investigators went undercover early this year to find out. We tried to contact the timber baron. Though he proved elusive – too busy with political campaigning to talk – we were able to speak to his deputy, Vadim Kovalevsky. Kovalevsky confirmed that Bakurov's group continued to supply Ikea, including via a local processing company called Uspekh – Russian for "success".

"Yes," said Bakurov's right-hand man, "we [still] have buyers who buy wood from us and then sell it in the form of finished products to Ikea."

Data from the Russian government's wood tracking system, LesEGAIS, confirmed Bakurov firm Kapel (which conducts the logging in his leases, including Vilis) as the largest supplier of raw materials to Uspekh, which is itself located right next door to Bakurov's own processing site in a town close to Bratsk. Uspekh turns the wood into small, planed pine staves, which are glued together to make boards. During the period from January 2020 to March 2021, nearly half (49 per cent) of Uspekh's raw materials came from Bakurov's forest lease-holding companies. And almost all (93 per cent) of Uspekh's supplies from companies certified by global green auditors the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – the only wood that Ikea accepts – came from Bakurov.

While undercover, and after an introduction from Kovalevsky, Earthsight spoke to Uspekh’s director, Anna Prelovskaya. She confirmed her company sourced from Bakurov's group and said that they had been supplying wood used in making Ikea furniture for over six years.

Prevlovskaya added that Ikea represents a significant share of the company's total turnover, which varied from 50 per cent to 70 per cent, depending on the season.

She went on to say that the Ikea manufacturers her company supplies include one based in Southeast Asia, but would not provide its name. The director also wouldn't say which specific Ikea products used her company's wood.

Fortunately, we had other means of finding this out. Customs records obtained by Earthsight show Uspekh regularly ships large volumes of pine staves and boards to an Indonesian firm called PT Karya Sutarindo. Its factory is in the town of Sukorejo, part of the furniture manufacturing hub surrounding the port of Surabaya, East Java.

At a facility nestled at the base of the active 11,000-foot volcano Mount Arjuno, workers clad in matching light-blue shirts – most of them women – have churned out furniture for one of the world's best-known brands for more than 15 years, we learnt.

Though nominally independent like most Ikea suppliers, Sutarindo depends almost entirely on the Swedish furniture giant for its business. Ikea was responsible for 96 per cent of the company's sales in 2019.

Child's play

Sutarindo's main business is in kids' furniture – and it is a booming one.

The global market for children's furniture in 2018 was worth $29.4 billion, and is expected to grow by almost 5 per cent annually in the coming years. More than 60 per cent of this furniture is made of wood. The continued success of the children's furniture market has seen big brands signing licensing deals with top fashion designers and celebrities like Hollywood actress Drew Barrymore. The pandemic accelerated this growth, closing schools during national lockdowns and forcing parents to set up home classrooms. Industry experts note that buyers of children's furniture are also more likely to be concerned about sustainability.

Ikea's children's range accounts for between 6 and 8 per cent of its overall business in its mature markets, though this proportion can be much higher in emerging ones like India. Figures contained in Ikea's annual report suggest the company's total sales of kids' products were more than €3.2bn last year.

Though it is cheap, the brand's trendy designs draw customers from a broad range of backgrounds. Even the third in line for the British throne, seven-year-old Prince George, has Ikea furniture in his bedroom. During a tour of an Ikea store in Stockholm in 2018, his parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, better known as William and Kate, revealed they had bought such furniture for his sister too.

Last year, Sutarindo supplied more than 2.2 million items of children's furniture to Ikea with a retail value of $60 million, Indonesian records obtained by Earthsight show. That's equivalent to 2 per cent of Ikea's total revenues that year. The goods included best-selling products like the discount Latt table and chair set and most of the items in the Sundvik children's range – chairs, tables, beds and wardrobes, among others.

The records also reveal the Indonesian company ships to Ikea stores in countries worldwide, including the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium and Canada. Of these sales, 45 per cent were destined for the European Union, and another fifth for the US.

Tip of the iceberg

Earthsight's findings represent just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the presence of illegal Russian wood in both Europe and Ikea.

Ikea's consumption of Russian wood has skyrocketed in recent years. The firm used 1.9 million cubic metres of Russian logs in 2019, almost double that of five years earlier. The staggering volume represents at least a million felled trees.

Russia is Ikea's second-largest source of wood after Poland. Its forests represent a growing share of the company's supplies with stocks from elsewhere already maxed out. In 2014, 6.5 per cent of Ikea's wood came from Russia. By 2019 the proportion had risen to 9 per cent.

Ikea even has its own forests in Russia. But these supply only 7 per cent of its Russian wood needs. The rest comes from a raft of third-party suppliers, of whom Bakurov is just one.

To ensure this wood is legitimate, Ikea relies heavily on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme. Founded in the early 1990s by a group of environmental charities and progressive timber firms, FSC has grown into a behemoth. Its auditors visit and check 2.3 million square kilometres of forest worldwide each year (an area one quarter the size of the United States), supposedly ensuring that logging there is both legal and kind to people and wildlife. FSC's cuddly green tree-tick logo adorns thousands of everyday products, from tissue paper to furniture, books and even clothes made from viscose pulp.

Though it was originally meant to be a tool for environmentally conscientious consumers to ensure that they weren't contributing to global deforestation, FSC’s label has increasingly become a must-have for companies wanting to stay within the law or sell to governments and other big buyers. Some forest countries have made certification from FSC or its equivalent compulsory for loggers and timber traders, while many of the biggest international markets for wood, including the US, EU, UK, Australia and Japan, have passed legislation which makes it hard to import or sell the stuff without it.

Brothers in arms

The biggest driver of FSC's growth, however, has been Ikea. The Swedish furniture retailer was among the organisation's founders and is by far the largest consumer of wood carrying its label. Ikea committed a decade ago to source all its fresh wood from FSC-certified forests, a target it achieved last year. The brand almost failed to meet its goal – and would have done so were it not for Russia.

Almost entirely due to demand from Ikea, the area of FSC-certified forest in Russia has grown dramatically. With growth elsewhere flatlining, business from Russia has been the principal driver behind FSC's aggressive worldwide expansion.

In the five years to 2019, Russia represented 62 per cent of net global growth in FSC's certified forest area. Most of the remaining growth came from neighbouring Ukraine and Belarus, which are plagued by similar problems. Ikea's demand for wood from Russia has risen in lockstep with the area of FSC forest in the country.

An area of Russian forest the size of France is now FSC certified – equivalent to 14 per cent of its production forest (woodland in which logging is allowed).

Of this area, 30 per cent is in Siberia or the Russian Far East. And the largest expanse of certified forest within this region by far? Irkutsk province. Woodlands under the FSC banner in the remote territory include parts of the Bakurov empire where Earthsight documented rampant lawbreaking.

Ikea's support for FSC in Russia should have been a good thing. The vast country was well known for poor forest governance, with illegal and unsustainable logging the norm. By bringing in third-party auditors and ending the reliance on governments to police logging, FSC was supposed to improve things. In some ways it has. But fundamental flaws in how it works have led it astray.

Alexey Yaroshenko from Greenpeace Russia is well aware of FSC's flaws. He told Earthsight that voluntary forest certification schemes are unable to protect precious forests or guarantee that accredited wood products are made from legal and sustainable materials.

"We appreciate the striving of our colleagues from the FSC to make Russian forestry and forest exploitation more responsible and legal," he added, "but we understand that so far this has not been very successful."

FSC's failures would prove costly in the Bakurov saga, particularly for Ikea.

Elephant in the room

When auditors visit a logging company to assess its activities against the FSC criteria, they are required to publish a summary of their findings. This transparency is intended to ensure that anyone can see what the auditors found and how they came to their decision. Often, the most revealing details of what is really happening in a forest come not in the form of what these reports say, but what they miss out.

Over time, such reports can run into hundreds of pages. With language largely impenetrable to all but a select few, they include microscopic details on trivial matters. Yet all too often they also manage to omit – or perhaps deliberately obscure – hugely important facts. In one forest in Ukraine, for example, audit reports obsessed over the type of trousers loggers were wearing – while neglecting to mention the rampant lawbreaking the environmental police had exposed there.

The proverbial elephant in the room in the Bakurov case was far larger. This is because, shockingly, some two-fifths of the forests where Bakurov's companies have been engaged in wanton destruction in recent years have had the FSC imprimatur that whole time. After more than 10 years of checks, the published reports run to a combined 234 pages. The auditors found time to record how many ambulances the local hospital has, along with a single case of a fuel storage tank being put in the wrong place. But, somehow, they failed to notice an illegal timber grab of quite startling dimensions happening right in front of their eyes.

The logging in 95,000 hectares of forest leased to Bakurov's Vilis LLC was first certified in December 2010 by Forest Certification LLC, Russia's home-grown FSC-accredited auditing firm. Since then the company's auditors have been back no fewer than 13 times. What they missed confounds belief.

All the illegal acts described in Chapter 2: 'The heist' were detected by Russian authorities or Earthsight in Bakurov's FSC-certified Vilis concession, as well as in other Bakurov forest leases. The charge sheet is stark: court decisions have ruled that amendments to three of the five FSC-certified Vilis leases were illegal; field evidence confirms the unjustified and illegal nature of this sanitary logging by showing that the forest concerned was healthy; in one of the FSC-certified leases, satellite images show illegal logging continued even after the courts invalidated the lease amendment concerned; the illegal sanitary clearcuts within the Vilis concessions included some of the largest areas within the wider Bakurov estate in protective zones along the edges of lakes and rivers, areas especially important for the spawning of fish and prevention of erosion and pollution of water sources; in 2019, 86 per cent of all timber cut within the Vilis concession certified by FSC came from illegal sanitary harvesting in protected forests; and more than 40 per cent of trees illegally harvested in protected forests across the Bakurov empire over the last decade were cut in Vilis's certified land leases.

In short: there have been publicly available indications of wrongdoing by Bakurov's companies, including within the FSC-certified Vilis concession, for years. FSC auditors reported none of this information. Instead, the lease amendments which vastly increased the scale of felling in the concession went unremarked on. Auditors also made no mention of the controversy regarding the legality of these lease amendments, despite the allegations by local prosecutors having been a matter of public record since September 2014 for Bakurov's wider group and October 2018 for Vilis in particular, and court decisions relating to these allegations being a matter of public record since December 2014 for Bakurov's wider group and in April 2019 for Vilis in particular.

The scandal regarding this illegal sanitary logging by Bakurov's companies, including Vilis, has also been repeatedly mentioned in the local press since 2015. Yet once again FSC auditors did not mention this in their annual inspection reports.

Nothing to see here

So how did auditors seem to miss such obvious illegal logging and environmental crimes? Were they asleep, hoodwinked or simply incompetent? At best, the case indicates wilful blindness on their part.

Despite glaring omissions, the summary reports show that the auditors weren't entirely in the dark. The documents suggest auditors knew that the allowable cut in the Vilis leases had dramatically increased, since they dutifully reported the revised numbers. But they didn't note or comment on the changes. The reports also reveal that auditors were aware as early as 2010 that Vilis was conducting sanitary logging in protected forests. And while auditors did not need to visit each separate part of the company's FSC-certified land leases on an inspection, the reports claim that auditors paid multiple visits to the two leases where we know widespread sanitary felling was happening in protected forests, at the time it was happening. In every report, the auditors claim that their field checks included ones relating to the justifiability of sanitary felling. They also claim to have included visits to the boundaries of protected forest zones along the banks of water sources.

It certainly seems implausible that forestry professionals could be ignorant of Russia's problem of illegal sanitary logging, or the scandal surrounding it in Irkutsk, the country's biggest timber producing province. The matter was well known to all those engaged in the forest sector, be they in the remotest taiga or Moscow. It is also hard to see how the systematic breaches of regulations during harvesting, as detected by Earthsight's research, do not appear to have been spotted during the annual field checks that supposedly took place.

However, while individual failures by the Russian company doing the audits likely played a part, the certification scheme's flawed systems and procedures were at least as important in explaining this fiasco. Earthsight and others have highlighted such structural defects in previous reports relating to FSC certification in other countries, but still they remain.

Blinkers on

The problems started the moment the certification was first approved.

To avoid its brand being used to mask, or greenwash, environmental abuses and wrongdoing, FSC requires logging companies to declare all of the forests they control, not just the land they are looking to have certified. Uncertified forests are not subject to the full list of FSC's checks, but auditors are expected to carry out some basic due diligence on logging within them like ensuring it meets minimum legal standards.

Importantly, however, the rules don't require the auditors to check whether the company being certified has been honest in its declaration. They also leave some room for interpretation over which of its affiliated corporate entities need to be declared. In this case, Bakurov's logging companies DeepForest, Vertical-B and Noviy Les were never declared in FSC public summaries for Vilis despite all four firms being owned by the same man. As a result, auditors were under no obligation to monitor whether they were engaged in criminal activity, despite plentiful clues that they formed part of a larger whole.

It was for this reason that auditors did not notice – or could ignore – the scandals involving Bakurov's uncertified firms long before they spread to Vilis. One of the most damning examples of confirmed illegal, unjustified sanitary felling in protected forests considered in this report involved Bakurov outfit DeepForest, in which a forest official was jailed for falsifying documents claiming trees in one of the company's forest lease were diseased. Local press reports also alleged the involvement of Bakurov's wider group with the illegal sanitary logging in Tukolon Wildlife Refuge which resulted in the arrest of the provincial forest minister (Earthsight was not able to substantiate these claims). The FSC reports mention none of this.

Timber laundering

The lawbreaking taking place in the parts of Evgeny Bakurov's forest estate that are not certified are potentially more important to this story than they might first appear. And again, the fault lies with FSC's core systems.

Ensuring illegal wood is not laundered through certified supply chains is a crucial function for forest certification schemes. Unfortunately, a series of scandals shows FSC is failing to stem the flow of dirty timber despite a growing arsenal of technologies now available to detect it.

FSC's 'chain-of-custody' system is entirely paper-based, and predicated on a level of trust in logging and timber processing companies which has been shown time and again to be undeserved. Companies merely have to show they have the necessary safeguards in place to keep certified and uncertified wood separate, and not that they actually use them. FSC's proposed 'Online Claims Platform' could have eliminated the problem of uncertified wood slipping into certified supply chains by ensuring only as much FSC wood was sold as was harvested. But the certification scheme abandoned the plan after pressure from timber industry members.

Earthsight's research suggests uncertified timber from Bakurov's forest estate was very likely laundered into FSC supply chains. Earthsight's estimate of logging activity in Vilis leases in the period 2014-2019, drawn from remote-sensing data, indicates the company reported in its official declarations that a much larger area of forest was cut down each year than was actually the case. Nearly 9,400 hectares of forest was declared to FSC as having been logged over the period – an area 48 per cent larger than the remote-sensing data's estimate of 6,300 hectares.

The discrepancy means that 535,000 cubic metres of wood, a volume six times as big as London's Royal Albert Hall and representing a third (35 per cent) of the 1,539,057 cubic metres Vilis declared to have harvested over the period (excluding wood obtained through thinning), could not be accounted for by the observed activities.

Though a methodology of this kind is necessarily open to some small level of error, this cannot explain such a huge discrepancy. This is supported by the fact that an identical analysis by Earthsight of a nearby non-Bakurov lease produced an estimate of harvest area within 6 per cent of that which had been reported.

So how to explain the gap between the company's data and the satellite evidence? A likely explanation is that wood harvested elsewhere was falsely recorded as coming from Vilis forest concessions, and subsequently laundered as FSC-certified.

There could yet be other, more innocent explanations. But no-one really knows, and given Bakurov's history, it would seem unwise to give him the benefit of the doubt.

FSC does have powers to spot timber laundering and stop it from happening, but, in a classic Catch-22, will only use them if there is evidence that timber laundering is already taking place. The forest certification scheme expects NGOs to provide that evidence – but doesn't publish the data they would need to find it.

Race to the bottom

Even the failure of individual auditors and auditing firm Forest Certification to follow FSC rules in this case can arguably be placed at the green label's own door. For many years, environmentalists have highlighted a glaring flaw in how the certification scheme works. It subcontracts auditing duties to for-profit firms which are paid directly by the very companies they are meant to police. With third-party auditing bodies competing for business from logging firms, wood processors and traders, the system engages them in a so-called "race to the bottom", driving down auditing standards.

Forest Certification, the auditing firm which certified Bakurov's empire and failed to notice the rampaging elephant in the room, is a case in point. Whereas other FSC certification firms are international companies operating pretty much everywhere, Forest Certification is a Russian-owned company specialising in certifying forests in the former Soviet Union – particularly Russia and Ukraine. Over the last few years, it has carved out a niche for itself in the high-risk region.

While in 2016 the Russian firm was responsible for monitoring 10 per cent of the area of FSC certified logging in its home country, by 2019 this proportion had grown to 58 per cent. Forest Certification's services have also been particularly sought-after in Russia's most lawless regions. Though it is responsible for 41 per cent of FSC 'forest management' certificates in the European part of Russia, it has issued almost two-thirds of them in Siberia and the Russian Far East. In Irkutsk, the proportion is even higher. Of the 30 certificates active as of December last year, Forest Certification was responsible for 21 – including Bakurov-owned Vilis.

Forest Certification also has a growing business in Ukraine, where it is now responsible for monitoring a quarter of the total FSC certified forest area. Its reputation there isn't great. One of its first jobs was certifying a large, state-owned forestry enterprise in Polissia, in the north of Ukraine. A previous report by Earthsight, published in 2018, revealed that the enterprise was at the centre of a major ongoing criminal corruption probe, and was illegally exporting logs in the guise of "fuelwood" in volumes greater than any other state-backed forestry business in the country. Forest Certification's auditors appeared not to notice either.

FSC subsidiary Accreditation Services International (ASI), tasked with watching the watchdogs, is meant to prevent these mistakes. But its oversight of the competing certification bodies has failed to stop environmental abuses from happening right under their noses. This is because ASI only examines a small sample of FSC-accredited forests, following the same flawed procedures as the certifying bodies it is meant to police.

As it happens, ASI never felt Vilis was worthy of their attention, despite one of Forest Certification's auditors – quickly overruled by his superiors – describing the company as "high-risk". ASI did carry out a general audit of Forest Certification's headquarters in September 2020, but gave the certification body a clean bill of health. Exactly why is not clear, because the findings of the audit are kept secret.

Clean slate

In November 2020, during Vilis's five-year FSC recertification audit, the company's FSC certification was amended to remove four of its five forest leases. At the same time, the remaining lease was transferred to another Bakurov-owned company, Kalinov Most. No plausible explanation for these changes is provided by the auditors in the FSC public summary.

A possible reason for the changes is that the illegal sanitary logging which had been taking place within the forest leases for years could no longer be kept from (or ignored by) the auditors. Therefore, to retain his FSC accreditation, Bakurov removed the Vilis leases within which the illegalities had occurred from the scope of the certificate. The leases were certainly not removed because of belated action by auditors.

So why transfer the remaining lease from Vilis to Kalinov Most? This may also have been done to circumvent FSC's partial certification rules and avoid auditors having to consider what had occurred in the areas now out of scope. Kalinov Most, a separate legal entity untainted from past scandals, could claim it had no responsibility for the actions of Vilis.

With his business reputation increasingly called into question, and perhaps mindful of the possibility that FSC might one day – belatedly – catch up with him, Bakurov has also sought backup from FSC's global competitor, Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).

PEFC's reputation is worse than FSC's, and so are its standards. Though it doesn't quite have the cachet of the leading green label, and will not suffice for Ikea, its certificates are nevertheless enough for most of Europe's eco-conscious wood buyers. In December 2020, Earthsight revealed how timber linked to the largest Russian illegal logging case this century had received the PEFC stamp and flooded into Europe as a result.

PEFC certainly did no better in noticing Bakurov's illegalities. In April this year, they approved a certificate covering two of the ex-Vilis leases and a third lease held by Kalinov Most. Again, the two Vilis leases where the rampant illegal harvesting had been occurring until very recently were excluded. That the PEFC auditors didn't pick up on Bakurov's shady background perhaps isn't surprising, since they were from the same firm – Forest Certification – which had somehow failed to spot anything fishy while certifying his company for FSC for the previous 10 years.

Though the rotten leases were excluded from the scope of these certificates, this did not mean the risk of illegal wood being rubberstamped by the two green labels had disappeared. Given the evidence of laundering of uncertified wood by Bakurov's firms, their reputation for other illegalities, and the record of the auditors, that would surely have been a rather false hope.

There is also the small matter of Russia's many other FSC-certified and PEFC-certified forests to consider, all audited using the same flawed systems and many by the same local auditing firm. Similar issues are almost certainly to be found in these other forests. Indeed, we know that what has happened within Bakurov's FSC-certified forest leases is not unique, in Russia let alone the wider world.

Broken silence: Ikea's Ukrainian wood supply

Earthsight has caught Ikea selling illegal wood laundered by FSC before. Both the furniture retailer and the global wood watchdog ignored important lessons from the scandal and, until they reform, are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.

We revealed in an investigation published in June 2020 how some of Ikea's bestselling products, the Ingolf dining chair and folding Terje chair, among others, had been made from illegally felled beech trees from one of Europe's last great forests.

Our report found the world's largest furniture retailer was a major buyer of illegal wood from the once-dense Carpathian Mountains in southwest Ukraine, home to some of Europe's rarest wildlife. The 18-month investigation caught Ikea's suppliers in Ukraine breaking numerous environmental and logging laws.

As in Russia, healthy trees were cut under the false pretext they were diseased or dying out. Such sanitary logging also occurred at a time known as the 'silence period' when it is banned so that animals can breed. And as in Russia, the forests and firms concerned were given the green light by FSC, despite rampant and sustained rule-breaking.

We also demonstrated that it was very likely that FSC-certified logs on which bribes had been paid into the offshore accounts of a corrupt Ukrainian forest minister had made their way into Ikea's products in the past.

Ukraine scandal fallout

Earthsight's investigation into Ikea's wood supply from Ukraine made headlines worldwide and caused a scandal in a country struggling at the time to cope with severe storms and floods in its western provinces.

The Ukrainian Prime Minister, Denys Shmygal, pledged a crackdown on illegal logging in the country days after we published our findings.

While the crackdown was welcome, it did not address the systematic policy flaws at the root of the problem. Five leading Ukrainian civil society groups sought to address this inadequate response in an open letter demanding that Ukrainian authorities implement sweeping reforms to the country's forest sector and calling on the EU to support those changes.

In early 2021, the European Union did make one ground-breaking move in response to Earthsight's reports about Ukraine. The bloc issued a guidance document for Member States acknowledging that neither FSC systems nor government documents could ensure that Ukrainian wood was legal. They said that if companies in Europe were to comply with its law on legality of wood imports, they would have to do a lot more, and if they could not, they must halt purchases.

At the same time, pressure continued from the public and policymakers for Ikea to clean up its act. The Swedish retail giant's role driving deforestation in Ukraine was mentioned in a debate at the European Parliament and more than 200,000 people signed an online petition demanding the brand take actions including setting targets to reduce its wood use and halting timber supplies from virgin forests.

But what of Ikea and FSC themselves? Their responses were at best lacklustre and tried to spin the systemic scandal into the very thing we warned against: a case of a few bad apples.

The rotten apple argument

Our report covered a wide range of Ukrainian supply chains connected to Ikea, and made clear that the issues identified were systematic. It also made clear that the implications went beyond Ukraine, with similar problems very likely to be found in other high-risk Ikea supplier countries like Russia. Ikea and FSC, however, honed in on just one specific Ukrainian supplier and ignored everything else. The narrow scope of their responses ensured that the conditions that created the scandal have not gone away.

Responding to our findings last year, Ikea issued a blanket denial of accepting illegal wood – even as Ukrainian authorities unearthed fresh evidence of lawbreaking by its supplier.

FSC's response, meanwhile, neither welcomed the findings nor promised to look into them. Instead, the wood watchdog shifted into damage-control mode, publishing a 19-page document in an FAQ format skirting well-documented issues and pushing misleading – and in some cases factually incorrect – claims. Earthsight debunked the corporate spin, point by point.

Then, in October 2020, Ikea issued a one-page press release announcing that an internal probe and another conducted by an obscure Ukrainian outfit "showed no indications that illegally logged wood had entered our supply chain." The firm it hired for this purpose also issues FSC certificates to Ukrainian timber companies and forest bodies, an obvious conflict of interest.

Ikea's statement could not be independently verified. Ikea refused to share the reports with Earthsight and other NGOs, claiming that it had to keep the documents secret "to preserve the integrity of the individuals and partners involved, as well as the methods deployed by the auditor for this investigation in Ukraine."

To absolve itself of responsibility for perhaps the most egregious illegality we found in the single supply chain they chose to investigate, Ikea decided that it was better placed to interpret Ukrainian law than a Ukrainian government agency. Ignoring that agency's decision that sanitary felling had occurred illegally during periods when such logging was not allowed, Ikea said instead that the law was unclear and "open to interpretation".

Tellingly, nowhere in its response did Ikea address the need for meaningful reform of FSC. Instead it backed the piecemeal efforts FSC announced in Ukraine, isolated actions that will not make FSC fit for purpose.

The stage was set for another scandal.

What took you so long?

Earthsight shared the key findings in this report in advance of publication with the principal protagonists, including Ikea and FSC. We sent them to Bakurov too, but he never replied.

In an email response to our findings, Ikea admitted doing business with Bakurov but maintained that "the wood in question which entered our supply chain is legally harvested".

Nonetheless, the retailer went on to say in its email on 15 June that it had been "analysing the forestry sector in Siberia including the practices of the business operator in question [i.e. Bakurov]" for several months and decided to "no longer accept wood from these companies" sometime in spring 2021, citing unspecified "practices of concern". The decision was taken as an "extra safety measure in accordance with our internal Due Diligence System," the statement continued.

Ikea's statement did not address why it had taken so long to drop its supplier, given evidence of serious illegalities by Bakurov's companies had first become public nearly seven years earlier.

The retailer refused to answer additional questions about the exact date of the decision (which does not rule out the period after Earthsight first got in touch), what exactly the "practices of concern" were, and how and when the company found out about them.

Ikea also claimed that our assessment that the company had failed to address illegalities in Ukraine is "incorrect", though as evidence presented only a claim that the firm had continued to "work to address the issue of conflicting legislation" in the country.

Tech troubles

FSC International's statement on 15 June did not address Earthsight's specific findings about its apparent failure to spot rampant illegal logging conducted by Bakurov's companies, or how illegal wood bearing its logo ended up in furniture stores around the world. The global green label did, however, issue a general statement on its activities in Russia.

"FSC is aware of the risks associated with partial certification in forests within countries where local law enforcement is weak," FSC's head office in Bonn, Germany, said in the statement. "We acknowledge that this potentially poses a risk to FSC System Integrity and we are looking at ways of mitigating these risks in different ways."

Disappointingly, none of the examples cited by FSC look likely to achieve this.

FSC told Earthsight it has used scientific tests to check wood species and origin, but the weblink they provided suggests this technology is a service they offer to companies rather than an enforcement mechanism. The tests would also have been meaningless in both the Russia and Ukraine cases involving Ikea which Earthsight exposed, neither of which involved false claims over wood species or origin.

FSC went on to say that its existing (read: unsystematic) use of Transaction Verification is "evolving into a more systematic approach through Blockchain", which it is currently piloting in Ukraine and China. Again, the technology would have made no difference in this case. No technology, however flashy, can tell auditors whether the harvest data a logger enters into the FSC system is actually true. Plus, FSC has not committed to making any kind of transaction verification a standard part of its systems. Without such a commitment, these technologies are little more than a public relations exercise.

Something similar can be said of another recent development FSC was keen to highlight, a GIS portal for use by certification bodies which shows maps of tree cover loss. In fact such maps – notably WRI's Global Forest Watch – have been readily available for the best part of a decade. The problem is that auditors are not required to use them – something that remains unchanged. FSC isn't even willing to demand that certified companies publish the boundaries of their forests.

In its statement, FSC also stressed that it had been working to study and seek to better address the problem of illegal sanitary logging (for more details, read FSC's full response to Earthsight here). Though the sustainable wood label claimed that it can help companies carry out the 'due diligence' checks required by the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) because its supply chains "mitigate risks of illegal timber", it acknowledged that retailers and other companies importing wood or wood products from high-risk countries like Russia must perform additional checks to comply with the EU import law or other equivalent international regulations.

Blame game

FSC's wider response to our findings was characterised by a combination of buck-passing and panic.

In its official statement, FSC International seemed to imply that blame for poor oversight of Bakurov's companies lay with its subcontracted auditors in Russia.

The FSC head office stressed that it was "not directly accountable for non-compliance of third parties", like the certification bodies carrying out annual audits on the ground. It also said certification bodies do sometimes "overlook or miss non-compliance", though without admitting this was the case here.

The certification body concerned, meanwhile, threw the blame right back. In its response to Earthsight, Forest Certification LLC on 14 June did not deny being aware of the illegalities happening in Bakurov's uncertified forest leases, but instead stressed that [according to FSC rules]: "one legal entity [i.e. Vilis] cannot be held liable for another legal entity just because they are owned by the one owner."

Even though Forest Certification claimed its inspections of Vilis sanitary felling sites "did not reveal any violation of legislation", it was at pains to emphasise that FSC "does not require specialised forest pathological measures at the level of specific felling." Auditors, it added, therefore relied primarily on official documents and consultations with stakeholders to assess whether such logging was legal. The certification body also blamed Russian officials for interpreting contradictory laws differently to each other. Such situations, it said, meant certain practices once considered legal were "suddenly" reclassified as breaking the law. Yet in the next sentence, the company claimed to apply a "risk-based approach" to assessing clients. If this was true, then why didn't Bakurov's certified firm Vilis represent such a "risk"?

Adding to the confusion, a strange thing happened at the very same time FSC and its auditors fired off responses to Earthsight denying any wrongdoing and insisting all was well. Without any warning or explanation, the FSC certification for Bakurov's company Kalinov Most (which now holds the remaining certified leases previously held by Vilis) was quietly terminated. A webpage on the green label's online database of certificates was updated on 15 June to reflect the change, which went unmentioned in both parties' official responses. Earthsight could find no public summary or other document uploaded to explain the move. We doubt the timing is a coincidence.

Still, at least FSC were kind enough to respond to Earthsight's request for comment. A similar email sent to their business rivals, PEFC, went unanswered.

Root and branch reform at FSC

Panic, passing the buck and scrapping one certificate years too late will not solve the entrenched problems facing FSC, in Russia or more widely. As Earthsight documented in our 2020 Flatpacked Forests report, FSC's failures are not just limited to Russia and Ukraine. Illegal logging. Corruption. Human rights abuses. Precious rainforests razed. Beatings and murder of forest communities. You name the crime and companies carrying the FSC logo have been accused of being complicit in it.

When the timber trade remains a major driver of global deforestation and forest degradation, processes which are in turn responsible for one tenth of climate-changing emissions, what's happening in forests certified by FSC has consequences for the whole world. Given that FSC encompasses between one-fifth and one-quarter of the world's industrial wood production, and likely a much greater share of wood imported and sold in Europe and the US, when its auditors allow the wholesale plunder of precious forests, whether knowingly or not, the environmental costs are huge.

As the Flatpacked Forests report explains in more detail, the good wood label's issues stem from its failure to address its fundamental flaws.

The FSC stamp and standards, backed by the retail giant Ikea, thus provide false reassurance to shoppers concerned about the environmental impact of the books, napkins, paper, straws, wardrobes and other wood products they buy. The clean, green logo hides an ugly reality.

The Bakurov case provides further evidence of the urgent need for deep-rooted reforms – a complete overhaul of systems and procedures to prevent FSC rubberstamping more stolen trees into our children's bedrooms.

FSC needs above all to stop denying its problems or believing they can be fixed with a generous smattering of technological wizardry. Immediate actions it could take include forcing auditors to make routine use of satellite imagery, court documents and media reports when conducting audits, and to clarify partial certification rules to avoid someone like Bakurov running roughshod over them.

But such small, procedural steps won't be enough. The forest certification scheme must also address its structural flaws. This may be hard, as the organisation's industry members will need to be on board for the necessary steps to be approved in votes at FSC's General Assembly. But if FSC is to retain any credibility, such reforms are essential. Necessary changes include making transaction verification compulsory, shifting the burden of proof for serious illegalities and removing the conflict of interest at the heart of the system regarding how auditors are paid.

Taming the tree-munching machine

Though its response to Earthsight's findings did not acknowledge any wrongdoing or fault on its part, Ikea's actions since suggest that it is finally, belatedly realising that it has a real problem on its hands.

Rushing to get ahead of the coming scandal after being alerted to our findings in advance, Ikea on 29 June 2021 announced a raft of new steps clearly triggered by them. The company announced that it would increase its own audits of supply chains in high-risk countries by 30 per cent, third party audits by 50 per cent and unannounced supplier audits by at least 20 per cent. It also announced plans to make greater use of technology to verify its wood supplies.

Most importantly, Ikea declared an immediate ban on the use of sanitary-felled wood from the Russian Far East and Siberia.

But these steps, while welcome, won't prevent the Swedish giant being embroiled in further scandals. Sanitary-felled wood from elsewhere in Russia is also at high risk of illegality, but remains welcome in Ikea's products. There are illegalities aplenty relating to non-sanitary felling as well. Given the propensity for fraud by Russian loggers, it is also unclear how Ikea can ensure that sanitary-felled wood is not laundered as originating from other types of logging and therefore able to continue entering its supply chains. More audits won't help if they aren't better designed, more meaningful and more independent as well. Throwing technology at the problem will be no more effective for Ikea than it will for FSC, for reasons previously mentioned.

By trying to work around FSC's flaws without publicly acknowledging them, Ikea is also failing in its wider responsibilities. As by far its biggest supporter and consumer, the global furniture giant has the power to drive change at FSC. The retailer must demand the necessary reforms – and threaten to ditch the green label if they are not achieved within a given timeframe.

Ikea should publicly acknowledge that the Bakurov case represents a serious failure of policy implementation by both it and FSC. It should then commission a truly independent audit of its wider purchasing in Russia, to include inspections of FSC certified supplier forests. It must then publish a summary of the results, and explain how it will address them.

Ultimately, however, Ikea needs to go beyond even these steps. It needs to acknowledge that buying FSC-certified materials will never be enough to ensure its wood consumption is environmentally sustainable.

The root of the problem lies in the retail giant's 'fast furniture' business model. Though the brand has piloted schemes like leasing or buying back some used furniture, they account for a marginal share of its overall operation. The company is the world's largest wood consumer, munching through a mind-boggling 21 million cubic metres of the stuff in 2019 – roughly equivalent to one tree every second. Wood products make up three-fifths of the company's sales.

This appetite is huge – and expanding. To maintain growth, Ikea must keep finding new sources of timber. Its published reports suggest its wood consumption doubled in the last decade and each year the company consumes between 1.8 million and 2.5 million trees more than the previous one.

Like other behemoth brands, Ikea exerts a relentless pressure on the vast pool of contractors competing for its business. Its relentless, and growing, demand for cheap, sustainable wood encourages its business partners to cut corners to keep up supplies. Earthsight has previously shed light on Ikea's near monopolistic power over suppliers. For a supplier, deceiving a multibillion-dollar brand on sustainability is risky; but refusing to give it what it wants, suicidal. Forced to choose between environmental standards and bankruptcy, a supplier may see felling trees against the law as a no-brainer.

Ikea did take one broad positive step following our report, when in January 2021 it announced a new 'Forest Agenda 2030' including a commitment to source a third of their wood raw material from recycled sources by that date. This was a welcome, albeit tacit, admission that FSC certification alone is not enough. But it is a disappointingly low target, considering that 12 per cent of the firm's wood is already from recycled sources.

They need to go much further. To address its outsize impact on the world's forests, Ikea must commit to a timebound plan to first eliminate all sourcing of wood from relatively intact natural forests, then eliminate all wood from any natural forests, and ultimately source all wood from recycled sources. High-risk countries like Russia should be a priority throughout this process, rather than – as at present – being expected to do much of the heavy lifting in supplying Ikea's ever-growing appetite for wood.

Credits

Cover art and supply chain illustration: Matt Hall

Opening montage images: ExportLes / Julia Kiseleva / YouTube; Nina Aldin Thune (licensed under CC BY 2.5); Earthsight

European Union flags photo: Thijs ter Haar (licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Floating log rafts near forest photo © Earthsight

Film trailer: Leo Plunkett

Maps: Dirk Wright

Full list of references available here