Inter IKEA Group has strengthened the checks on its Romanian wood supply chain rather than abandon one of its highest-risk sourcing markets, tightening the annual audits of where and how its suppliers obtain timber in a country with a long record of illegal harvesting. That is according to Ulf Johansson, head of raw materials at Inter IKEA Group, who set out the position on the latest episode of Screw It, the podcast run by Ingka Group, the world’s largest IKEA retailer.
Johansson brings 25 years of company wood supply and forestry experience to that judgment, having started as a forestry manager in Southeast Asia in 2000 before moving into his current global role. Every supplier’s sourcing plan is reviewed each year to verify the source of its wood, with all timber in IKEA products required to carry Forest Stewardship Council certification and to meet the mandatory IWAY MUST sourcing standard.
Where a supplier cannot show its wood meets those requirements, deliveries are blocked until compliance can be verified, and suppliers that keep falling short are dropped from the supply chain. Some countries are off the sourcing list altogether because the risks are judged too hard to manage, though in Romania, the company works with suppliers willing to improve, and Johansson said he believes the forests IKEA manages and sources from there are responsibly managed today.
Campaigners reject that reading, with Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe reporting in September that IKEA suppliers were harvesting high-biodiversity-value stands, including the Rusca Montană forest, one of Romania’s last old-growth ecosystems. “IKEA is deliberately ignoring warnings to stay out of precious forests,” Robert Cyglicki, head of biodiversity at Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, said of findings his team projected onto a Bucharest store to launch the report.
That report followed a 2024 Greenpeace investigation, which traced transports from old-growth harvest plots to seven supplier factories making products including SNIGLAR cribs and INGOLF chairs, with at least 30 items found in IKEA stores across 13 countries. Data analysis by the Environmental Investigation Agency, supporting that work, used GPS tracks from Romania’s SUMAL transport system to link harvest plots inside old-growth forests to IKEA sub-suppliers and the factories they supplied.
Johansson cautioned that Romania’s harvest figures should be read carefully, describing a “dark figure” in the data left by illegal harvesting that was never fully tracked, a gap he said still shows up in some countries. On the recorded numbers, Romania harvests less than half its annual forest growth, so more wood is added to its forests each year than is removed, whereas Sweden cuts nearly 90 per cent of yearly growth and replaces harvested areas through planting or natural regeneration.
To verify where a tree actually grew, the company runs isotope analysis, with laboratories testing a small sample from wood in finished furniture and matching it against reference collections built at Kew Gardens in London and in the United States. Working with Kew, IKEA has also developed a DNA test for rattan, a plant with nearly 500 species that often look almost identical, letting the company tell threatened species apart from those it can source.
The company carries unusual weight in those decisions as the world’s third-largest timber consumer, accounting for 1 per cent of global lumber demand. Its franchisee, Ingka Investments, has meanwhile become the largest private forest owner in Romania, holding 51,000 hectares there, part of a global estate of 495,000 hectares across the Baltic states, Romania, the United States, New Zealand, and Finland.
Romania’s Forest Guard has uncovered 2,000 falsified timber transport declarations in two years, with only 2.4 per cent of the Carpathian forest currently protected from harvesting. On Johansson’s account, IKEA’s answer is to audit more rigorously within that market rather than leave it out, a position it backs with annual supplier reviews and beefed-up isotope testing.
