About Us

Global Witness has been working hard over the last 15 years to change thinking and ensure the international community reduces global environmental harm arising from natural resource exploitation and that the world's natural resources are managed to maximise sustainable development, preserve natural ecosystem, and benefit the people who live in and around them.

Our forest campaigns work to:

• End deforestation and degradation through large scale industrial logging by the removal of public subsidies to private industry.
• Ensure better regulation, forest law enforcement and improved governance in the forest sector.
• Tackle illegal logging, the trade in conflict timber and unsustainable forest use.
• Enable ordinary citizens to monitor and inflluence the management of "their resources" - public goods - through strengthening civil society and implementing Independent Forest Monitoring.
• Change international and producer-government perception about the role and management of the world's remaining tropical forests, and other forests at risk, and to arrive at an optimal use scenario that first and foremost benefits forest-dependent people, their home countries, and the environment.
• Seek new forest management and governance safeguards through global provesses like reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) payments.

We have made important strides in positively challenging international thinking on forest exploitation. But, although we are proud of our achievements so far, there is still much to do.

We will continue to identify ways of supporting efforts to achieve lasting reforms in the forest sector that will guarantee the preservation of the world's natural forests, respect for local people's traditional and customary rights, and equity and transparency in the distribution of revenues generated by the legal and sustainable use of forests.

That's why we're proud to be working to Make the Forest Sector Transparent.