The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) has pioneered an innovative approach to demonstrating the sustainability of US hardwood products.
It has combined independent regionwide risk assessment of forest governance, regular forest monitoring data, assessment of product life cycle environmental impacts and provision of a detailed American Hardwood Environmental Profile (AHEP) with every export consignment.
AHEC’s strategy is a response to insurmountable technical barriers to widespread forest certification in the US hardwood sector, leading to effective discrimination against it. The critical certification barrier is that over 90% of products derive from non-industrial private forest land and the more than nine million US private forest ownerships, averaging under 15 hectares, find the cost and complexities of certification prohibitive. Ownership fragmentation also results in complex supply chains, increasing wood tracking system costs.
The result is reflected in National Woodland Ownership Survey statistics; 20 years on from first forest certificates being issued in the US hardwood industry, just 5% of privately owned forest area is certified. At the same time US forest inventory data shows that hardwood forest area has increased by 2.7 million hectares and standing volume by 2.1 billion m3.
In the absence of widespread certification, AHEC’s efforts to develop an alternative method for demonstrating good forestry began in 2008, when it commissioned an independent study from Seneca Creek Associates. This was the first sector-wide, systematic quantitative assessment of the risk of “controversial wood” – from genetically modified timber, to material derived from high conservation forests – entering supply chains. The risk, it concluded, was negligible.
The study proved highly influential for laws like the US Lacey Act Amendment of 2008 and the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR), which aim to prevent illegal products entering timber trade flows. It highlighted the role systematic regional assessment of forest governance systems can play to mitigate risks of sourcing illegal wood.
AHEC has now commissioned a review of the Seneca Creek study to assess changes in forest regulation and management that may impact on its original negligible risk assessment, and further explore the potential of regional risk assessment in demonstrating US hardwood conformance to sustainability principles.
It is also building on the work of the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program, which can identify how much wood, of which species, is growing or harvested in each American county.
AHEC is making FIA data readily accessible through a new online interactive map, via which users can analyse distribution of trees, growth and harvest for 22 key hardwood species making up 96% of US hardwood forest volume.
It is also addressing another shortcoming of some corporate and public sector “sustainable timber” policies, which focus on forestry, ignoring environmental impacts at other life cycle stages. Since 2010, AHEC has worked with sustainability consultants thinkstep to compile data on life-cycle environmental impact of US hardwood in line with international carbon footprint and LCA standards.
Drawing on this work, AHEC can model environmental impacts of delivering US hardwood lumber and veneer to any market worldwide.
AHEC’s American Hardwood Environmental Profile (AHEP) also provides a simple practical tool to communicate environmental information to timber buyers and specifiers. This consignment-specific shipping document contains information on the legality and sustainability of the hardwood shipment, including quantitative data on environmental impacts of delivery.
There’s still work to be done to ensure universal acceptance of AHEC’s approach to demonstrating sustainability. The good news is that buyers, specifiers and policy-makers are beginning to recognise the need, and opportunity, to move beyond an approach centred on forest unit certification.
