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By Root 2155 0

from decreased taxes and increased access to bidding on projects. I should make clear, in connection both with LEED standards and with buyers’ groups, that both are driven ultimately by environmental concerns of individual consumers, and by the desire of companies to have their corporate brand become associated with environmental responsibility by consumers. What LEED standards and buyers’ groups do is to provide a mechanism whereby individual consumers can influence the behavior of companies that would otherwise not be directly responsive to individual consumers.

The forest certification movement has spread rapidly around the world since the FSC’s launching in 1993, to the point where at present there are certified forests and chains of custody in about 64 countries. The area of certified forests now totals 156,000 square miles, of which 33,000 are in North America. Nine countries each contain at least 4,000 square miles of certified forests, led by Sweden with 38,000 square miles (representing more than half of that country’s total forested area), and followed in descending order by Poland, the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Latvia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Russia. The countries in which the highest percentages of forest products sold are FSC-labeled are the United Kingdom, where about 20% of all wood sold is FSC-certified, and the Netherlands. Sixteen countries have individual certified forests exceeding 400 square miles in area, of which the largest in North America is the 7,800-square-mile Gordon Cosens Forest in Ontario, managed by the Canadian timber and paper giant Tembec. By the near future, Tembec intends to certify all of the 50,000 square miles of forest that it manages in Canada. Certified forests include both publicly and privately owned ones: for instance, the largest single owner of certified forest in the U.S. is the State of Pennsylvania, with about 3,000 square miles.

Initially after the formation of the FSC, the area of forests certified was doubling each year. More recently, the rate of growth has slowed to “only” 40% per year. That’s because the first forest companies and managers that became certified were ones that had already espoused FSC standards. The companies whose forests have become accredited more recently tend to be ones that must change their operations in order to achieve FSC standards. That is, the FSC initially served mainly to recognize companies with environmentally sound practices, and is now increasingly serving to change the practices of other companies that were initially less sound environmentally.

The effectiveness of the Forest Stewardship Council has received the ultimate compliment from logging companies opposed to it: they have set up their own competing certification organizations with weaker standards. These include the Sustainable Forestry Initiative in the U.S., set up by the American Forest and Paper Association; the Canadian Standards Association; and the Pan-European Forest Council. The effect (and presumably the purpose) is to confuse the public with competing claims: for instance, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative initially proposed six different labels making six different claims. All of these “knockoffs” differ from the FSC in that they do not require independent third-party certification, but they permit companies to certify themselves (I’m not joking). They do not ask companies to judge themselves by uniform standards and quantifiable results (e.g., “width of the strips of riparian vegetation flanking streams”), but instead by unquantifiable processes (“we have a policy,” “our managers participate in discussions”). They lack chain-of-custody certification, so that any product of a sawmill that receives both certified and uncertified timber becomes certified. The Pan-European Forest Council practices regional automatic certification, by which for instance the entire country of Austria became certified quickly. It remains to be seen whether, in the future, these competing industry attempts at self-certification will be outcompeted by the FSC through losing credibility