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By Root 2153 0

non-profit organization called the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is headquartered in Germany and funded by several businesses, governments, foundations, and environmental organizations. The council is run by an elected board, and ultimately by the FSC’s membership, which includes representatives of the timber industry and of environmental and social interests. The FSC’s original tasks were three-fold: to draw up a list of criteria of sound forest management; then, to set up a mechanism for certifying whether any particular forest satisfied those criteria; and, finally, to set up another mechanism for tracing products from such a certified forest through the complex supplier chain all the way to the consumers, so that a consumer could know whether the paper, chair, or board that he or she was buying in a store, and that carried the FSC logo, actually came from a soundly managed forest.

The first of those tasks resulted in the formulation of 10 detailed criteria of sound and sustainable forest management. Those include: harvesting trees only at a rate that can be sustained indefinitely, with growth of new trees adequate to replace felled trees; sparing of forests of special conservation value, such as old-growth forests, which should not be converted into homogenous tree plantations; long-term preservation of biodiversity, nutrient recycling, soil integrity, and other forest ecosystem functions; protection of watersheds, and maintenance of adequately wide riparian zones along streams and lakes; a long-term management plan; acceptable off-site disposal of chemicals and waste; obedience of prevailing laws; and acknowledgment of the rights of local indigenous communities and forest workers.

The next task was to establish a process for ascertaining whether the management of a given forest does meet those criteria. The FSC does not certify forests itself: instead, it accredits forest certification organizations that actually visit a forest and spend up to two weeks inspecting it. There are a dozen such organizations around the world, all of them accredited to operate internationally; the two that do most of the inspections in the U.S. are called SmartWood and Scientific Certification Systems, headquartered in Vermont and in California, respectively. An owner or manager of a forest contracts with a certification organization for an inspection, and pays for the audit, without any advance guarantee of a favorable outcome. The certifier’s response after the inspection is often to impose a list of pre-conditions that must be met before approval, or just to grant provisional approval based on a list of conditions that must be met before use of the FSC label will be permitted.

It should be emphasized that the initiative in getting a forest certified must always be taken by the owner or manager; the certifiers do not go around inspecting forests uninvited. Of course, that raises the question why any forest owner or manager would choose to pay in order to be inspected. The answer is that increasing numbers of owners and managers decide that it will be in their financial interest, because the certification fee will be earned back as a result of access to more markets and consumers through the improved image and credibility gained through independent third-party certification. The essence of FSC certification is that consumers can believe it, because it is not an unsubstantiated boast by the company itself but the result of an examination, against internationally accepted standards of best practice, by trained and experienced auditors who don’t hesitate to say no or to impose conditions.

The remaining step was to document what is called the “chain of custody,” or paper trail by which wood from a tree cut in Oregon ends up as a board offered for sale in a store in Miami. Even if a forest itself is certified, the forest’s owners may sell its timber to a sawmill that also saws uncertified timber, then the sawmill may sell its cut wood to a manufacturer that also buys uncertified cut wood, and so on. The web of interrelationships