Training Hub

This short course guides you through the essentials of FLEGT for the timber industry.

This course was produced in 2016 as part of the Vietnamese project ‘Increasing capacity of CSOs and SMEs to implement FLEGT requirements’ funded by NEPCon and the European Union. This resource, like the project, aims to benefit a variety of users, such as timber enterprises, timber associations, non-governmental organisations and institutions working in the timber industry, who would like to have a more detailed understanding of timber legality in relation to the EU FLEGT Action Plan.

This course consists of three recorded presentations, each 24-40 minutes in length and each followed by a short quiz to help learners test their knowledge and track their learning progress. The presentations are also available to download to aid your study. All presentations and quizzes are available in two languages: English and Vietnamese.

The project “Increasing Capacity of Civil Society Organisations and SMEs to Implement FLEGT Requirements”, was funded by the European Union and implemented by NEPCon and SFMI from 01.03.2014 to 28.02.2017.

This course was originally published on the project’s websites: https://flegt-tools.org/ (unavailable) and https://dehieuflegt.org/ (unavailable) and moved to the NEPCon Training Hub on the closure of those sites in 2018.

Please note that since this course was published in 2016 progress has been made with the VPAs, of note for target audience, Vietnam and the EU signed the VPA in October 2018.

An Overview of the EU FLEGT Action Plan 

• The EU FLEGT Action Plan: aims, history and components
• The EU Timber Regulation (EUTR)
• Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA)
• Timber Legality Assurance System (TLAS)
• Relation between the EUTR and VPAs
• Defining legal timber

The EU Timber Regulation in detail

• Introduction: History, requirements and scope
• Who’s involved
• Defining obligations
• What is legal/illegal
• Product scope
• Enforcement: Penalties, liability, proof
• Operator’s obligations in detail: due diligence
• Impacts on the Vietnamese industry
• Resources

Chain of Custody in the forest sector

• What is chain of custody (CoC) and why is it important?
• CoC models
• CoC and traceability within and between organisations
• Critical control points
• CoC certification and models in practice
• CoC in Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) and their Timber Legality Assurance Systems (TLAS)