The Origin App

Deforestation accelerates the climate crisis. Up to half of all wood products sold on global markets are illegally sourced, stolen from indigenous communities and protected areas worldwide (UNEP). Illegally logged wood is laundered into global markets through opaque, untraceable supply chains, manufactured into finished products, and sold at retail.

The nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has developed the Origin App to break this laundering cycle, providing a bridge of information transparency linking buyers to the forests where a product’s raw materials came from. Users scan an item’s barcode to learn the species and location where the trees were harvested. The App gives users one-click options to demand this origin info from manufacturers if none is available.

As more users request origin info and a people-powered movement grows, manufacturers will find additional value in transparency, and will demand traceability from their suppliers, thus shutting off markets for illegally sourced timber.

Up to 50% of all timber traded worldwide was illegally sourced (UNEP). Illegally harvested and traded timber threatens forest conservation and ecosystems, and robs communities and governments of economic opportunities while leaving behind environmental degradation. INTERPOL puts the trade in illegally sourced wood products between 30-100 billion USD annually - money that fuels corruption and the destruction of precious forests around the world (INTERPOL). 

While many companies have made voluntary commitments to stop or reduce both legal and illegal deforestation, the commitments have fallen short in practice, largely due to the opacity of global supply chains that allow illegally-sourced timber to be mixed into wood products sold in markets around the world.

Eco-friendly certification labels have proven woefully inadequate, in particular due to this lack of traceability (MSI-Integrity, 2020); Greenpeace, 2021). Well-meaning consumers purchase “sustainable”, “fair”, and “ethical” products, but in reality, many of these products continue to drive illegal deforestation.

The Origin App seeks to break the cycle of laundering by providing a bridge of information transparency linking buyers to the forests where a products’ raw materials were sourced. App users scan the barcode of an item on a shelf to learn the species and location where the trees that made the product were harvested. If no information is available, the Origin App gives users one-click options to demand this origin info from manufacturers.

As more users request origin info and a people-powered movement grows, manufacturers will find additional value in transparency and demand traceability from their suppliers, thus shutting off markets for illegally sourced timber and, over time, ushering in a "new normal" where buyers expect origin info by default. 

This is a long-term process. In the immediate term, the Origin App gives special preference to products with short supply chains - i.e., those that link forest communities or local forests directly with end consumers.

This gives community-managed forests a way to market their products directly to consumers, and to educate consumers about the communities’ sustainable practices and the importance of supporting their work. In contrast, products that lack this transparency and traceability will stand out for their opacity.

The target population we aim to meaningfully impact in the long-term are forest communities. To reach that goal, it is first essential to target consumers of wood products whose practices and livelihoods directly impact the timber trade and related ecosystems. 

By engaging consumers and equipping them with information, we are raising awareness about how their purchasing power can positively contribute to changing the economies and livelihoods of forest communities. Specifically, the App engages consumers to think in terms of real origin information - a yes/no question that tells consumers immediately if companies have real traceability or not. If a product does not have origin info listed, users can use the Origin App to push companies to provide this information - crowd-sourcing demand to continually increase pressure on companies, and to give the companies a clear business rationale to establish traceable, transparent supply chains.

The more that global wood products supply chains become traceable, the harder it becomes for unscrupulous actors to launder illegally-sourced wood into global markets, cutting off the flow of money to timber thieves, and reducing the threats to forests and giving community-led sustainable management a fighting chance.

In the long term, forest-dependent communities will greatly benefit, but to reach that goal it is first necessary to target global consumers.

Resilient ecosystems take decades to create, but can be destroyed in an instant. Today’s global sourcing of wood products utilizes complex and opaque supply chains where illegally logged timber can easily be laundered in. High prices paid by consumers for decking and furniture from tropical wood increase threats to forest communities by incentivizing unscrupulous loggers to steal wood from forest communities.

The Origin App aims to bring about a sea-change in the global sourcing of timber. By incentivizing and valuing products with verifiable origin information, the App drives consumers towards sustainable forest communities, and away from illegally sourced products.

We have launched the App, Instagram, and website. Through the current pilot stage of the Origin App, we are working with a focus group of volunteers who are testing and providing feedback on the messaging, functionality, and overall impact of the App. Once we bring the App to scale, we will need to be heavily involved in the daily and weekly maintenance of the App and social media pages.

This growth stage will require consistent outreach to attract new users, align with existing movements, respond to user demands for timber origin information, contact companies, etc. As we have already identified that the growth stage will require additional capacity beyond our current operation levels, through the Solve grant we would be able to support additional changes to the App based on feedback received during the pilot, and to support our transition to the growth stage.

We are tackling the problem of illegal and unsustainable logging, which is a major driver of deforestation and climate change. One way we expect to change the market is through the Origin App. We will give consumers and companies alike new and aligned vocabulary to describe sustainable and ethical supply chains, built around the foundation of transparency and traceability. Consumers will be more aligned in what they demand from “responsible” companies, and companies will have a clear task for how to share this information - declaring the product’s forest origins, and establishing sufficient traceability to allow them to do this.

The App is one component in EIA’s broader Origin Project, that seeks to enhance supply chain transparency through traceability systems in producer country forest management and verifying the company claims through Timber ID testing. The App aims to change the market, and the broader Origin Project ensures these changes are valid and not greenwashing. 

Once consumers begin to seek and obtain timber origin more consistently, this will empower consumers to ask the same questions of other products. The concept of “origin” may soon become as ubiquitous and important as “organic” or “climate friendly”, with complementary means to verify claims. 

Knowing origin helps consumers determine whether the products they purchase contributed to illicit deforestation, and sharing this information with consumers provides a carrot for responsible actors and a stick against bad actions, empowering consumer decisions and in the end resulting in positive ripple effects in forest governance and management.

We’ve only recently released the Origin App, so at the current time our user base remains quite small. Within one year, our goal is to have the App downloaded by 5,000 users, expanding to 100,000 within 5 years.

As noted above, our long-term target population is forest-dependent communities. We aim to support 500 individuals directly within one year, by adding artisanal handicrafts from forest communities to our App to allow communities a way to market directly to end consumers. Within 5 years, we aim to benefit 50,000 individuals indirectly by adding a majority of wood products from major companies to the Origin App, thus shifting these markets away from illegally sourced timber products.

We will measure the success of our project using a variety of indicators, including: 

• Downloads and usage of the Origin App 

• Number of demands for origin information by consumers, showing engagement 

• Number of companies providing origin information into the Origin App 

• Number of products containing origin information in the Origin App

The Origin App is a project of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). Five staff members work part-time on the Origin App (Manager, Campaign Coordinator, Technology Engineer, Communications Specialists). We also draw on expertise amongst the other 25+ full time employees of EIA, as needed.

EIA has both an exceptional track-record of instigating systematic changes in how forests are governed and a wealth of relevant experience transforming timber and forest-risk commodity supply chains. EIA utilizes a unique combination of scientific, economic and social primary evidence, campaigning expertise, undercover documentary evidence, and advocacy for the implementation and enforcement of demand-side measures to secure improved forest governance, and implementation of groundbreaking traceability systems in collaboration with producer countries.

EIA's approach to improve forest supply chain regulations and enforcement, combined with increased due diligence and traceability requirements, has had a tangible impact on reducing illegal logging and associated forest destruction. EIA is well-suited – due to our long-term experience, growing team of technical experts, and partnerships with key civil society organizations in producer and consumer countries – to continue developing and disseminating new technologies that identify species and origin of wood products to bring transparency to global supply chains.

Various EIA staff members bring their unique and exceptional expertise to this  project, including supply chain experts, campaign coordinators, technology engineers, data analysts and communications specialists. This is due to the project’s cross-cutting nature which requires technological expertise, strategic outreach, curating effective messaging and coordination to amplify the Origin App and its long-lasting global impact.

EIA has been deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) since its inception 30 years ago. EIA’s mission centers around breaking down a global supremacy system by extractive industries that have disenfranchised local people and deplete our natural resources and ecosystems.  While we acknowledge that this is a process of continuous learning and reflection, we as an organization, starting with the board, executive team, and staff as a whole, have committed to rooting out racism and caste systems in our organization, our partners, our networks and our campaigns. 

Tangible actions we are engaged in include creating an internal task force to ensure that our procedures, policy, and culture serve to fulfill these goals internally for our staff and in the communities we engage with through our partnerships. The project proposed in this application, the Origin App, continues the EIA mission. It seeks to bring transparency to a global trade that has long masked its origins to hide often brutal inequities caused to local indigenous populations. The Origin App seeks to strengthen local forest defenders by bringing their voices directly to consumers around the globe. Our team is dedicated to achieving equity, diversity, and inclusion to do justice to this overall mission.

EIA has identified the following barriers to develop the Origin App, and for which we are seeking Solve support:

• Building the user base and finding partners: Our current level of capacity allows our team to engage with current partners and to begin to engage with new users on a limited basis. With additional funds ($200,000 per year) we can allocate additional EIA staff time to this project, and hire a dedicated Outreach Coordinator. 

• Technological barriers: We need funds to support development to make the App as robust as possible, to maintain and respond to any issues e.g. bug fixes as they may arise from an increased volume of users, and to greatly expand the content of our database and Origin website ($150,000 per year).

• Market barriers: We will strive to make the app a robust source of information that showcases how technology, consumer pressure, and buy-in from companies (an iterative feedback loop of information and demand) can bridge the information gap and address the opacity in timber supply chains. To achieve this goal, we seek new partnerships and in-kind support from Solve partners to help us expand our client base and to develop our business model to steer our transition from grants and investment to a self-sustaining model built around our ever-increasing database of raw material origins.

The design, creation and launching of the Origin App have been new experiences for EIA, adding new tools to our decades of experience as an effective nonprofit campaigning organization. In order to grow the Origin App’s user base and multiply the impact of the App, we are seeking advice and strategic partnerships from individuals and organizations with experience in strategy and development, social media, service distribution, and technology development. As the Origin App grows, we will seek to spin it off as a robust and self-sustaining entity built around our ever-increasing database of raw material origins.

We seek collaborations to assist us in preparation for investment discussions to grow our business model, technology mentorship, exposure and networking with MIT campus and the Solve community to grow our user base and buy-in from companies willing to participate, and grant funding from partners to allow us to scale successfully. 

The goal of the Origin App is to drive the development of a new world where consumers demand traceable origins, and illegally sourced raw materials are pushed out of global markets. We believe this is a key element for the creation of safe sustainable communities around the world - communities who can decide how to govern their own precious natural resources, free of the pressure to defend against illegal actors.