AHA’s smart geolocation approach combines independent deforestation-risk assessment at county level and legality-risk assessment at state level with county geolocations and, optionally, geolocations of real and potential harvest sites. Suppliers must provide details of mitigation where specified risks are identified at county level. County polygons remain available for efficient transference of provenance data throughout global supply chains while AHA’s annually updated harvest-site data layer supports users and customers seeking to apply the “declaration in excess” approach for EUDR compliance.
A manageable scale: Around 1,500 counties account for U.S. hardwood sawlog production, compared with approximately 9.4 million individual smallholders. County geolocations make it practical to identify and assess the areas from which a consignment may have originated.
A proportionate burden: Collecting and passing individual harvest-site data through a fragmented global supply chain places substantial demands on small producers and their customers. Where independent assessment establishes negligible risk, county-level information can support effective risk assessment without imposing that burden at every stage.
Equitable treatment of forest owners: The average U.S. county supplying hardwoods covers around 177,000 hectares, an area comparable to many single state or industry forest holdings. A county-based approach avoids requiring far more granular reporting from smallholders simply because their forests are divided among many owners.
A scale that can be checked: Plant-chemistry-based provenance techniques can help test whether wood comes from its claimed geographic area, but cannot currently identify an individual smallholder or harvest site with the same confidence. County-level claims provide a useful basis for this independent check.
Protection of sensitive information: Limiting the routine circulation of individual site data helps address landowner and Tribal rights, privacy, commercial confidentiality and antitrust concerns. For this reason, AHA’s harvest-site data is subject to a strict Data Use Notice while county geolocation data can be made more freely available.
A meaningful local jurisdiction: Counties are established administrative areas with an important role in local land and resource-use planning. They provide a practical geographic framework for presenting risk information to businesses and authorities.
A useful level of risk resolution: Counties are sufficiently local for AHA to distinguish areas with different deforestation risks more effectively than a country or state-level assessment. The approach is considerably more granular than the EUDR’s three-tier national risk-benchmarking system. Equally, providing extremely granular harvest-site geolocations to meet current EUDR requirements does not, by itself, improve on the county-level assessment.
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