Felled logs stacked in the hills near Trowupburn, Northumberland, England.
Photo: Geoff Holland, geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic licence.
What it is
Forest certification is a system in which independent auditors check forests and wood businesses against published standards. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international non-profit organization that sets standards for responsible forest management and for forest-product supply chains. Its system has two linked kinds of certificate. A forest management certificate verifies that a forest is managed responsibly under the council's principles and criteria. A chain of custody certificate tracks certified material through every stage of processing, manufacturing and distribution. The Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) is a global alliance of national certification systems. It endorses systems that national organizations develop through processes involving many stakeholders and adapt to local priorities and conditions. It began in 1999, when small and family forest owners in Europe created a system to show their sustainable forest management, and it now has more than 80 members.
Why it matters
Without a checked trail, a claim of sustainable wood is only a printed statement. The FSC reports that over 160 million hectares of forest and more than 70,000 organizations are certified to its standards. The PEFC reports 297 million hectares of certified forest and 29,800 companies certified for chain of custody. Both sets of figures come from the organizations' own websites. The FSC is governed by three chambers with equal voting rights, environmental, social and economic, and more than 1,200 members, from Indigenous Peoples to global companies, vote in them.
How to read it
Independent third-party certification bodies carry out the audits. A company applies to a certification body, receives an on-site audit and, if it complies, is given a certificate valid for five years, with annual audits after that. Only certified holders may use the FSC label and make FSC claims about products, so that wood can be traced from forest to market. When you see a label, ask which system issued it and whether the certificate covers the forest, the chain of custody or both.
Limits
The counts measure participation: hectares of certified forest and numbers of certified organizations. Each organization reports its own figures for its own system. A forest management certificate covers the audited forest, and a chain of custody certificate covers the handling of wood after it leaves the forest, so a label on a product reflects what its certificate covers. The FSC says it lists active investigations into organizations that may threaten the credibility of its system.
