Forest Industries Intelligence Ltd is a UK-based consultancy specialising in:
- Forest industry market intelligence and trade analysis
- Marketing and promotion
- International timber trade issues
- Forest policy and sustainability
- Life cycle assessment
The company is led by Rupert Oliver who has over 30 years experience working in the international timber trade and industry. He is regularly consulted by international and national agencies on timber market developments. He has written extensively on hardwood markets and forest management issues for a wide range of European trade and industry journals.
Rupert Oliver is Sustainability Consultant to the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), playing a lead role in the development of environmental marketing strategy for the US hardwood export industry. He contributed to the preparation of AHEC’s cradle-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment on American sawn hardwood and veneer delivered into export markets, the largest ever LCA study undertaken in the global hardwood industry. He has also played a lead role in AHEC’s pioneering work to develop the Sustainable Hardwood Coalition (SHC) certification framework to demonstrate legal and sustainable harvesting in the small non-industrial forestry sector through third party peer-reviewed jurisdictional risk assessment and drawing on innovations in remote sensing and techniques to identify timber origin based on chemical analysis of physical properties.
Rupert Oliver also worked with AHEC and Thinkstep, a leading global provider of sustainability services, to develop the American Hardwood Environmental Profile (AHEP) system to provide consignment and species specific environmental data at point of delivery on US hardwoods delivered into export markets.
Rupert Oliver manages the Sustainable Timber Information Exchange (STIX), an initiative of the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) to provide easy on-line access to global timber trade flow data. Between 2004 and 2023, he was the European correspondent for the ITTO’s Market Information Service. Until 2022, he was Lead Technical Consultant to the FLEGT Independent Market Monitor, a major EU-funded project hosted by ITTO. He was also formerly the lead author on hardwoods for the Annual Market Review of the UNECE Committee on Forests and the Forest Industry.
Since 2023, Rupert Oliver has acted on the Board of World Forest ID, an international organisation which is developing new forensic tools for tracing the origins of timber to facilitate development of more robust forest products certification and enforcement of anti-deforestation legislation.
FII Ltd regularly contributes information on international forest products trade flows to support FLEGT-related projects undertaken by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), Forest Trends, and TRAFFIC.