FSC reserves judgement on Government approach to assure legal and sustainable sources of timber.
On Monday the Government announced that timber processed through five forest certification schemes now give satisfactory assurance of being legally logged from sustainably managed forests. Thus three more schemes have been added to the original two that were approved in 2004. All candidate schemes were required to convince the Government that, to meet the sustainability criteria, they have procedures to ensure that environmental and social interest groups are involved in their standard-setting process and that consensus is achieved before decisions are taken. However, The Forest Stewardship Council, one of the original two schemes to gain approval in 2004, reserves judgement on how quickly and effectively the other three will be able to deliver on their sustainability commitments.
Charles Thwaites, Executive Director of FSC UK said: "We strongly believe that it is complete vindication of the FSC approach that other certification schemes have been asked to move towards the sort of standards we have been reaching for many years.
"It is surely to the continuing benefit of responsibly managed forests all around the world that only schemes demanding both the legal and sustainability criteria are being approved by governments. We welcome more schemes, if this means more responsibly managed forests, so long as the schemes themselves are robust and transparent."
"Having paper-based procedures on their own is simply not enough. It takes many years to make a system work at the level of the individual forest unit, especially one that includes sustainability considerations such as protection of biodiversity and the rights of indigenous peoples, to name but two. I worry that the Minister himself has admitted that the approval process has been just a desk-based assessment of these schemes and their procedures because the approval authority could not conduct forest-based assessments around the globe.
"We are all under the eye of the public and the NGOs, and it would be very damaging to the whole procurement process if any of the schemes fall below the standard now expected. We ourselves continue to believe that FSC standards are more demanding than all the rest, mainly because of the rigour with which we balance environmental and social interests against the economic gain to be made from logging. For this reason we retain, unlike the others, the endorsement of the NGOs, as well as most of the paper, construction and timber supply businesses in the UK."
Notes for Editors
1. The FSC is an international, non-profit making organisation, which has developed a forest certification and timber labelling system. FSC-certified forests are managed to the highest environmental, social and economic standards. There are currently over eighty-two million hectares of FSC-certified forest worldwide, over one and a half million of those in the UK.
2. The following statistics show the importance of FSC in the UK market: a group of major retailers, DIY stores, construction companies, timber merchants and those in the print and paper sector (the WWF UK FTN) turned over 12 million cubic metres of FSC certified timber-derived products in the year 2005-6, nearly 50% of their total. Collectively, these companies trade 31% of all timber products imported into the UK. The 2005 Co-operative Bank Ethical Consumer report shows an increase in sales of FSC products from £351m. in 1999 to £728 in 2004.
Supplied by: BECK WOODROW
Advisory Service
Construction Advisor
Forest Stewardship Council UK Working Group
www.fsc-uk.org
