Open Knowledge has produced an interactive trade dashboard for anti-corruption NGO Global Witness to supplement their exposé on EU and US companies importing illegal timber from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The DRC Timber Timber Trade Tracker consumes open data from DataHub.io to visualise where in the world Congolese timber is going. The dashboard makes it easy to identify countries that are importing large volumes of potentially illegal timber, and to see where timber shipped by companies accused of systematic illegal logging and social and environmental abuses is going on.
Global Witness has long campaigned for greater oversight of the logging industry in DRC which is home to two thirds of the world’s second largest rainforest. The logging industry is mired with corruption with two of the DRC’s biggest loggers allegedly complicit in the beating and raping of local populations. Alexandra Pardal, campaign leader at Global Witness said:
We knew that DRC logging companies were breaking the law, but the extent of illegality is truly shocking. The EU and US are failing in their legal obligations to keep timber linked to illegal logging, violence and intimidation off our shop floors. Traders are cashing in on a multi-million dollar business that is pushing the world’s vanishing rainforests to extinction.
The dashboard is part of a long term collaboration between Open Knowledge and Global Witness through which they have jointly created a series of interactives and data-driven investigations around corruption and conflict in the extractives industries.
To read the full report and see the dashboard go here.
If you work for an organisation that wants to make its data come alive on the web, get in touch with our team through services.okfn.org.
Sam is a data trainer and wrangler at Open Knowledge. He Tweets from @Noel_Mas
