Not All Forest Certification Programs Measure Up

We appreciate EBN’s comprehensive article Forest Certification Growing Fast (EBN Vol. 12, No. 4). While we agree that the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has driven important improvements in forestry and alternative certification programs, we strongly disagree that industry- and government-backed “certification programs are becoming similar enough to FSC that it might not matter which system is used.” While some of these weak programs are improving, they are not yet credible “green” labels or equivalent to FSC.

For example, in the United States, FSC has much more rigorous requirements than the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) for maintaining natural forest ecosystem attributes on timberlands. FSC prohibits logging of unentered old-growth forest in the United States, where little remains, while SFI permits it. Unlike FSC, SFI allows large-scale clearing of natural forests and their replacement by plantations, a practice that is decimating millions of acres of forests in the Southeastern United States (the largest wood producer in the world). Only FSC requires portions of existing plantations to be restored or managed under more natural conditions for the benefit of wildlife. FSC discourages chemical use much more actively than SFI and has stronger clearcutting rules, i.e., average allowable clearcut size is about 40 acres [16 ha] under FSC compared to 120 acres [48.5 ha] (116 football fields) under SFI. FSC’s “chain of custody” process and labeling rules ensure that FSC-certified products originate in FSC-certified forests, whereas SFI allows misleading labeling claims for wood that isn’t SFI-certified. Also, SFI does not address social issues such as indigenous people’s rights in their own backyards—a huge issue when SFI is applied in Canadian forests where government tenure and logging concessions may be in dispute. These are just some of the important program differences.

Other certification programs have problems as well. Both the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) and SFI allow individual companies to customize the certification standards used to assess them on a case-by-case basis. This situation is extreme under CSA, which has no common performance thresholds; all companies develop their own certification standards based on general guidelines. At least when FSC convenes regional stakeholder processes to tailor its international standards to conditions in different countries, any variations in FSC regional standards are approved by FSC, and the standards are applied consistently to every applicant in that region.

Because of such deficiencies in other programs, we encourage all wood users to express a preference for FSC-certified wood products—it‘s the fastest and most effective way to drive forestry reform. Most environmental groups, the U.S. Green Building Council, and progressive businesses still recognize FSC as the only environmentally and socially credible certification program in existence at this time.

Helene Walsh

Albertans for a Wild Chinchaga and Canadian Parks & Wilderness Society

Edmonton, AB, Canada

Randi Spivak

American Lands

Washington, D.C.

Alice Eichold

Berteaux Architectural Collaborative

Davis, California

Cam Brewer

Canadian Eco-Lumber Co-op

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Ananda Lee Tan

Canadian Reforestation &

Environmental Workers Society

Burnaby, BC, Canada

Donovan Woollard

Ecotrust Canada

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Jim Ford

ForestEthics

San Francisco, California

Shawna Bohlender

Friends of Clayoquot Sound

Tofino, BC, Canada

Tamara Stark

Greenpeace

Washington, D.C.

Vacouver, BC, Canada

Nicole Rycroft

Markets Initiative

Tofino, BC, Canada

Kate Heaton

Natural Resources Defense Council

San Francisco, California

Jennifer Krill

Rainforest Action Network

San Francisco, California

Jay Ritchlin

Reach for Unbleached

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Tyson Miller

Recycled Products Purchasing Cooperative and the Green Press Initiative

San Diego, California

Editors’ response:

While we feel that significant improvements in the SFI and CSA forest certification schemes do bring them closer to FSC, we concur that significant differences remain. We at BuildingGreen, Inc. have no intention of weakening the FSC-certification requirement for most wood products in our GreenSpec® Directory.

– Nadav Malin & Alex Wilson