Sustainability of the Log Trade Based on Ecological Information Approach

In recent years, countries with rich forest resources have introduced policies to restrict or ban the export of logs, so it is particularly necessary to study the sustainability of log trade. This paper uses ecological information-based approach to quantitatively analyze the sustainability of log trade for the first time. Firstly, we introduce the ecological information-based approach in detail, take the natural resource-based commodity,logs in woody forest products as the research object, and empirically analyze the sustainability of the foreign trade of logs in the 20 countries that led the import and export of global log trade from 2003 to 2017. The results show that the total system throughput (TST) of log trade fluctuates but rises on the whole, indicating that the log trade is growing in general. The alpha indicator of the sustainability of trade in logs has been declining year by year. This paper discusses the reasons for the sustainable decline of log trade from global economic factors and trade policy factors in various countries, and gives some suggestions for China to strengthen plantation construction and diversify import sources in response to the current situation of log trade.