FSC Forest Certification Standards Defining Responsible Forest Management
Sayeed Mehmood's Presentation on Forest Certification
24
FORESTS’ CONTRIBUTION TO A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY Sayeed R. Mehmood, PhD AFA Annual Meeting September 24, 2014
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Transcript of Sayeed Mehmood's Presentation on Forest Certification
FORESTS’ CONTRIBUTION TO A SUSTAINABLE
SOCIETY
Sayeed R. Mehmood, PhD
AFA Annual Meeting
September 24, 2014
WHAT DOES SUSTAINABILITY MEAN?
sus·tain·able
adjective \sə-ˈstā-nə-bəl\
: able to be used without being completely used up or destroyed
: involving methods that do not completely use up or destroy natural resources
: able to last or continue for a long time
Source: Miriam-Webster Dictionary
WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?
“Sustainability is improving human well being and ensuring social equity for present and future generations while safeguarding the planet's life-supporting ecosystems.”
Chris BooneDean, School of Sustainability
Arizona State University
Source: Johann Dreo
APPROACHES TO SUSTAINABILITY
The society demands sustainability. It also expects us to come up with ways to ensure that resources are sustainably managed.
There are two broad approaches to ensuring sustainability:
Regulatory approach. Voluntary, non-governmental, “market
based” approach. In the rest of the presentation, we will look at
three examples of efforts at ensuring resource sustainability.
CARBON SEQUESTRATION
We all remember the buzz around carbon sequestration from a few years ago.
The Chicago Climate Exchange was actively enrolling landowners into the program for carbon sequestration credits.
Unfortunately, in the absence of a national policy framework, that particular effort fell apart.
However, the idea of forest carbon offset is still very alive around the world, including North America.
CARBON SEQUESTRATION
The State of California has officially launched its cap-and-trade program.
This caused a renewed interest in forestry offsets in the U.S.
Toward the end of 2013, California issued the first forestry offset credits.
The Willitis Woods project in Mendocino County received 1.2 million offset credits.
A forestry project in eastern Maine received another 200,000 credits.
CARBON SEQUESTRATION
In 2009 U.S. forests absorbed an estimated 863 million metric tons of CO2e, about a third of that from southern forests.
Southern landowners have opportunities to participate in a number of carbon offset programs including:
Climate Action Reserve (CAR) American Carbon Registry (ACR) Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) California Cap-and-Trade Program
CARBON SEQUESTRATION
To be eligible for carbon offsets, some quality criteria must be satisfied; this usually include:
Verifiability Additionality Permanence Enforceability
FOREST CERTIFICATION Forest certification, or, forest management
certification is a process by which forest management practices are evaluated against a set of standards (Washburn and Block 2001).
An important question is: Who certifies? The general consensus is that it should be
performed by an independent party, much like an audit.
Many argue that in addition to being independent, the certifying party should also be a third party i.e. no relationship to the forest ownership.
FOREST CERTIFICATION The basic idea is to reward desirable
forest management practices. Assure consumers that the products are
manufactured from sustainable sources of wood.
It is intended to be a voluntary, non-regulatory, and incentive-based approach to sustainable forest management.
FOREST CERTIFICATION
There a several different certification programs available today. Examples include: Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), American Tree-Farm System, ISO 14001 and Canadian Standards Association (CSA).
FOREST CERTIFICATION
Mendell and Hamsley (2013) evaluated the effects of FSC and SFI certification standards on private forests.
The authors modeled the impacts on forest land in the South and the Pacific Northwest.
The southern model was based on 110,000 acres in AR and LA.
FOREST CERTIFICATION
THE MONTREAL PROCESS
The Montreal Process is basically an agreement among 12 countries on the sustainable management of the world’s boreal and temperate forests.
The process started with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), a.k.a. the Earth Summit.
Eventually, 12 countries signed an agreement on sustainable management of boreal and temperate forests in Montreal, Canada.
THE MONTREAL PROCESS
The 12 member nations are Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, United States, and Uruguay.
The nations collectively hold 60 percent of the world’s forests and about 90 percent of the boreal and temperate forests.
THE MONTREAL PROCESS
How does the monitoring process work? Not much differently than a certification
process would work. There are Criteria and Indicators and on the
ground monitoring is compared to a set of standards.
The Montreal process is an example of how some sustainability efforts can be not exactly regulatory, nor completely voluntary, but somewhat in between.
Why is this important?
