The forest certification debate is undergoing a major transformation.
Despite all the hype and endless negotiations, wood certified from ‘sustainably’ or ‘well’ managed forests have struggled to enter the mainstream. However, during 2001 there should be vastly improved supplies of certified material at competitive prices. This will create opportunities for forest products companies to present good environmental credentials to their customers. But there is also the growing threat of market confusion, as different brands of ‘certified wood’ compete for market share. How will consumers know which certificates are reliable and which are bogus? To overcome this, the forest sector is working towards the development of an international framework for mutual recognition of different certification schemes.
To date, demand for certified wood products has been largely a niche market. The UK is among the world’s largest markets for certified wood but even here, the volume of wood purchased by members of the 1995+ Group, the World Wide Fund for Nature co-ordinated group of companies favouring certified wood, accounts for only around 20% of total wood use. Demand is concentrated in the DIY retailer and public procurement sectors and is much weaker in the construction, joinery and furniture sectors. The proportion of trade encompassed by WWF buyers groups is generally lower in European countries and in North America. Although WWF is expanding its network of buyers groups, demand in other parts of the world remains restricted.
Supply problems
To some extent, the slow pick up in demand for certified wood products reflects the problems of supply. The impact of certification on world markets has been constrained by the difficulties of obtaining commercial quantities of certified wood at the right time and at the right price. This has acted as a brake on the marketing efforts of those promoting certified products. The most recent figures issued by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the only organisation that has so far marketed significant volumes of certified wood, indicate that around 21.4 million ha are recognised under the scheme worldwide. Based on FAO forest area data, FSC certified forest area amounts to only 0.5% of total world forest area.
However, certification markets are being transformed. Large volumes of certified wood from new certification schemes are about to enter the market. The FSC will no longer be the only brand on offer and competition between certification schemes should heat up. Forest certification will become supply driven rather than market driven as suppliers that have gone to the expense of developing and implementing certification schemes seek to cash in through increased marketing and promotion. Several forest certification schemes have matured recently. Two are particularly worthy of mention on the basis of current operational status and the area of forest land affected.
Pan-European scheme
First, the Pan European Forest Certification Scheme (PEFC) has been developed by representatives of 12 million private forest owners in 15 countries that together account for over 100 million ha of forest land. The scheme recognises certification frameworks developed at national level and markets these under a single pan-European trademark. For recognition, certification schemes must demonstrate that standards are in accordance with the pan-European (formerly Helsinki) criteria for sustainable forest management and that procedures for recognising independent forest certifiers have been developed through national accreditation bodies. By the end of last year, five national schemes had been endorsed by PEFC (Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden) and a total of 32.37 million ha had been certified.
Second, the American Forest and Paper Association‘s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) has been transformed over the past three years from a self-regulatory scheme for AF&PA members, into an independent certification programme open to all US forest owners. The SFI principles have been reformulated into the SFI standard and a comprehensive voluntary verification process has been established, drawing on a range of international and national auditing standards.
In a move designed to underlin§e SFI’s independence, management of the scheme was turned over to a multi-stakeholder Sustainable Forestry Board (SFB) during 2000. The SFB is composed of 15 members, 60% of whom must be representative of non-industry interests. Over 12 million ha had been third party certified by the end of 2000. It is anticipated that this will rise to over 22 million ha by the end of 2001.
Risk of confusion
These and other national and regional forest certification schemes will provide the international forest industry with increased opportunities to give customers reliable assurances of sustainable forest management. But there are also significant risks. Consumers may be confused by the wide range of certificates on offer which may encourage less scrupulous suppliers to introduce bogus certificates. Certification may lose its power to communicate.
Recognition of these problems led the International Forest Industry Roundtable (IFIR), a global network of national associations, to establish a working group in September 1999 to explore the most appropriate methods for international recognition of the various national and regional forest certification schemes. Through the working group, industry associations are exploring the potential for an ‘international mutual recognition framework system’ to link the various sustainable forestry programmes that are being developed.
Why mutual recognition?
‘Mutual recognition’ is viewed increasingly within the forest sector as the only realistic way to create a truly international forest certification framework. The immense variation that exists at global level between forest types, ownership structures and management objectives means it is difficult, some would say impossible, to conceive a single internationally harmonised forest certification system. Mutual recognition is a more flexible approach, allowing individual countries or regions to develop standards appropriate to local conditions. Once up and running, reciprocal agreements can be developed, either bilaterally or multi-laterally, with other schemes. Schemes entering these agreements will enjoy the shared use of trademarks and labels.
A vital step in the development of workable systems of mutual recognition is to establish minimum criteria for participation. They should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the wide variety of forestry environments, but also rigorous enough to provide confidence to customers and other stakeholders. While this is a challenging task, IFIR has been able to draw on the work of other organisations to develop a single set of criteria summarising the essential requirements of a credible certification scheme, together with a range of ‘indicators’ to assess compliance with the criteria. IFIR’s criteria and indicators draw on an extensive information-gathering exercise undertaken over the past two years by the Confederation of European Paper Industries to compare the components of existing forest certification schemes.
Development of an institutional framework to manage mutual recognition on a global scale is also under way. IFIR is seeking broader stakeholder comment on its proposals which include:
In a separate initiative, in January the PEFC board outlined for discussion possible options for extending the PEFC to areas outside Europe. One suggestion is that PEFC could promote the establishment of separate ‘geographical colleges’ based on the different political processes (ie the pan-European/Helsinki process for European forests, the Montreal process for other temperate and boreal forests, and the ITTO process for tropical forests). Each college could operate like PEFC, while there could also be an over-arching council of all member states to facilitate mutual recognition.
A single global trademark?
An important, unresolved issue, is the extent to which mutual recognition should seek to evolve towards a single internationally recognised ‘sustainable forestry trademark’, or whether there should remain scope for competition between a limited range of trademarks. Some European timber organisations and retailer groups are advocating the development of a single global framework for mutual recognition, linking all existing certification initiatives – including those developed through the FSC and PEFC and other non-affiliated national schemes.
At present, however, international negotiations seem to be heading towards the evolution of two competing international certification frameworks – the FSC and another framework linking the IFIR and PEFC initiatives. There may be merit in this outcome. Mutual recognition will have served to severely restrict the numbers of ‘good forestry’ trademarks, while at the same time maintaining choice in the market. Competition between two international frameworks may stimulate innovation and bring down the costs of forest certification. The two international frameworks may also serve different market niches. FSC could concentrate on the supply of certified products to the retail sector, where there is demand for product labels backed by mainstream environmentalists. The alternative IFIR/PEFC framework could focus more on business-to-business communication in other market sectors, and on satisfying industry demands for a cost-effective and reliable marketing tool.
