Liquidating the Forests

A new EIA investigative report reveals the largest flooring retailer in the United States is fueling Russia’s illegal logging crisis and endangering Siberian Tigers.

Liquidating the Forests: Hardwood Flooring, Organized Crime, and the World’s Last Siberian Tigers reveals that demand for hardwood flooring and furniture in the United States, European Union, Japan, and China is fueling corruption and making the world’s last temperate hardwood forests into a major epicenter for illegal logging. As much as 80 percent of all timber exported annually from the region is illegal. This activity serves to enrich a handful of corrupt actors, while destroying the Russian Far East’s unique biodiverse ecosystem, depriving the Russian state of tens of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue and threatening the livelihoods of over 100,000 indigenous people.