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In many ways, the Marrakech climate summit was entirely ordinary. As is usually the case, the first week was spent drowning in technical detail while most of the second was dedicated to photo opportunities and political speeches. And as always the negotiations ran over time, finishing early on Saturday morning.

But while this latest “Conference of the Parties” (COP) was intended to be an “action COP”, aimed at getting down to the business of implementing the Paris Climate Agreement reached last year, it will mainly be remembered as the “Trump COP”. It was a summit held under the spectre of renewed US climate recalcitrance in the wake of the surprise election result, which dropped like a bombshell on the summit’s third day.

The main topic of debate in the first week was the creation of a “Paris Rulebook”, set to be finalised by the end of 2018. The Paris Agreement sets up a loose skeleton for a pledge-and-review system of deepening emissions-reduction targets over the coming decades. Marrakech was intended to be one of the main political moments to put some flesh on the bare bones of this framework.

Such details included establishing the target years for future pledges, how to ensure transparency in action, and how the collective review of pledges (the “global stocktake”) would be conducted.

The going was slow and the outcomes procedural. On many issues, countries have got no further than agreeing on what questions need answering. The answers will have to wait for next November’s climate summit in Bonn.

Moreover, the schism between developed and developing countries over their respective responsibility for the climate problem began to reappear after being largely buried in Paris.

The meeting agreed that 2017 will mark the start of a five-year plan to address “Loss and Damage”, a broad category that includes both sudden and chronic climate impacts. But the tricky question of whether to continue with the Kyoto Protocol’s Adaptation Fund – created in 2001 to help developing countries deal with climate adaptation costs – was also kicked down the road for future discussions.

Roadmaps and ratification

Yet despite the slow progress of the central negotiations, Marrakech also produced plenty of promises of future action. Australia was among 11 countries that ratified the Paris Agreement during the summit, bringing the total to 111 since the treaty opened for signatures in April. The fact that countries continued to ratify even after Donald Trump won the keys to the White House was seen as a hopeful sign of resistance against his promise to unravel the Paris treaty.

During the summit’s closing days, 47 of the world’s poorest and most climatically vulnerable countries pledged to shift to 100% renewable energy as soon as possible.

Many richer and more powerful countries showed ambition too. Germany and Brazil were among 22 countries – plus 15 cities and 196 businesses – that committed to the “2050 pathways platform”, which involves developing strategies to become largely carbon-neutral by mid-century.

The United States signed up to the platform too, unveiling a plan to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 80%, relative to 2005 levels, by 2050. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to become official US government policy any time in at least the next four years.

There was also the release of the “Marrakech Action Proclamation”, an ambitious if vague one-pager pushed by the Moroccan government. The proclamation reaffirms numerous existing agreements and commits to the “full implementation” of the Paris Agreement and “to bring together the whole international community”.

Two common threads unite these various initiatives. First, while all are ambitious, they all also lack legal substance and specifics. They are political promises made in a time of tumult.

Second, they have a clear subtext: a note of defiance in the face of the potential threat that President-elect Trump poses to the Paris Agreement.

The Trump COP

Before November 9, the negotiations seemed largely unperturbed by the external world, secure in the prospect of a Hillary Clinton victory.

The election result’s impact was stark. Young activists wept and rallied; civil society held emergency strategy sessions. Many of the negotiations continued unabated, but unease was expressed behind the scenes.

Some delegations used the US election outcome for more sinister purposes. Saudi Arabia was reported to have told some delegations that Paris was dead under President-elect Trump, and that negotiations should instead turn back towards the original UN climate convention first agreed in 1992.

Behind closed doors, ministers doubtless discussed how to handle the incipient Trump presidency. The (now defeated) French presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy threatened to put a carbon tax on US imports if Trump withdraws from the Paris Agreement.

Just one day after the election, Venezuela publicly asked a US negotiator whether Trump would cause a “second Kyoto” – a reference to the disruption caused by former president George W. Bush’s refusal to ratify the earlier treaty. The response was coy, noting that no one knows what Trump will actually do.

Almost every side event had at least one Trump-related question that sent silent shudders through the room. France’s current president, François Hollande, warned Trump that the Paris Agreement is “irreversible”.

On the final day, the incoming presidency of Fiji (which will host the next climate summit in Bonn rather than at home) pleaded with Trump and invited him to visit the island nation to see the effects of climate change at first hand.

But there was little beyond the bluster. These were all emotive moments that drew applause, but ultimately were toothless speeches that neither Trump nor his transition team is likely to hear or heed.

Unfortunately, the official negotiations did not make the time to discuss how to address a renegade United States. This has been justified as a “wait and see” approach, but it looks more like a rabbit stuck in the headlights.

The negotiators in Marrakech spent so much time discussing future processes, yet could not summon the courage and foresight to confront a potentially existential threat head-on. A cynic would say that is fitting and symbolic of the climate negotiations to date.

Luke Kemp has received funding from the Australian and German governments.

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Telling an illegal log from another is no easy feat. CIFOR/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Forensic science has achieved infamy, thanks to television dramas like CSI. But it isn’t just about solving human crimes. Scientists are also using evidence from wood to help solve murders, but in this case the victims are the trees themselves, and the crime is illegal logging.

Illegal logging is a serious environmental and economic threat to forests. The value of the illegal timber trade is hard to calculate, but estimates range from US$30 billion to $100 billion, potentially involving 100 million cubic metres of wood.

But new scientific methods, highlighted in a recent study in Bioscience, are helping law enforcers identify tree victims and fight illegal logging.

Timber outlaws

Tropical regions such as Southeast Asia, Central Africa and Central and South America suffer disproportionately. Some 50-90% of timber produced from these regions is thought to be illegal, compared with 15-30% globally. Aside from the environmental destruction, countries that experience illegal logging lose out on tax revenue and have the value of their legitimate timber diminished.

Such large markets attract big players, with organised crime networks at the centre of much of the illegal trade.

Combating illegal logging is the moral responsibility of all countries, be they timber producers or consumers. Along with laws on how local timber can be harvested, an increasing number of laws are targeting the international illegal timber trade. These include Australia’s own Illegal Logging Prohibition Act, which prohibits the importation of timber that has been illegally harvested overseas.

At the international level, the CITES Convention provides a mechanism through which trade in certain species can be regulated in order to avoid driving them to extinction.

Smarter forensics

These laws are necessary and are already starting to have a positive effect through improved governance and procurement policies. But they rely on us knowing when a law has been broken.

Timber is notoriously hard to identify, even for experts. By looking at the structure of the wood alone, it is usually only possible to identify it to the genus level, rather than the species itself.

This is a problem because most timber laws protect individual species, and often only part of the range of that species. This means that law enforcement must rely on the paper trail that accompanies timber shipments, which is open to fraud.

Science can help by focusing on new ways to identify timber. Looking at the anatomy of wood (despite its inability to reveal species or place of origin) still provides the fastest and cheapest way to get an initial identification.

However, new identification techniques including genetic and chemical fingerprinting can provide more detail and could deliver the detection capacity we sorely need. By combining several techniques, the type and source of timber can be determined with great accuracy.

Developing techniques in a lab is a far cry from applying them to the real world, however. A major problem is that although forensic methods have been proven to work in case studies, developing tools that distinguish between hundreds of species and geographic regions requires investment in research and development.

One of the major challenges is to collect reference material (wood and herbarium specimens of commercially important species, and their lookalikes, from across the globe).

A recent CITES meeting approved a raft of measures to help increase the collection and sharing of reference materials for timber. This will help to improve identification tests.

Enforcing the law

While we find new scientific ways to protect the world’s forests, it is equally important to make sure these tools are available at the front line. Law enforcers have a huge task.

Customs officers are already responsible for preventing trade in illegal drugs, firearms and wildlife products, as well as human trafficking. Identifying shipments of illegally harvested wood within a massive legitimate trade is a big ask, so we must find ways to make this possible.

The international community has recognised these problems. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has released a guide to timber identification and a decision-making tool to help law enforcers and the scientific and legal communities through the complex processes of dealing with illegal timber.

Ethical consumers

As a timber researcher and part of the international team driving most of these initiatives, it’s satisfying to see progress not only in the science of protecting our forests, but also in international cooperation to make sure we see concrete results.

Yet I can’t help feeling that it’s not enough. Real progress must come not just through enforcement (because of course, once a crime has been detected, it is too late) but through consumers making smarter choices.

We are all consumers of timber, from the furniture we sit on to the paper we write on. And as consumers, we can demand more accountability from suppliers, to support verified and certified products harvested from sustainable sources.

By doing so we can increase the incentives for legal logging and support those businesses that do the right thing. So next time you buy something made from a tree, give a thought to where it has come from and try to make an ethical choice.

Eleanor Dormontt works for The University of Adelaide and has consulted for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Her group has received funding from the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), The Australian Research Council (ARC), The World Resources Institute (WRI) and Double Helix Tracking Technologies Pte Ltd (DX).

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