Information Note
Over the last year ProForest has been carrying out work aimed at improving the effectiveness of certification as a tool for encouraging sustainable forest management. The work has been funded by the Forestry Research Programme of the UK Department for International Development. The second phase of the project will focus on the processes of standardisation, accreditation and certification necessary to ensure consistent verification of sustainable forest management. The work will pull together and take forward recent studies on requirements for credible forest certification. The work is designed to:
Enable certification schemes to assess whether the standards, accreditation requirements and certification process of another scheme will ensure a result compatible with their own scheme.
Enable the international forest products trade, consumers and nongovernmental organisations to assess the credibility of alternative certification schemes.
The output from the work will be a proposed set of criteria for credible forest certification systems that should provide a basis for a wider international discussion on mutual recognition. The criteria will be developed in the following phases:
Phase 1: Review all of the relevant recent work and prepare a working document setting out possible criteria with an initial assessment of their relevance.
Phase 2: Convene a working group of experts, chosen for their technical knowledge of certification systems, to draft a set of criteria.
Phase 3: Circulate the draft criteria widely to interested parties, particularly certification schemes
Phase 4: Review the responses to the draft and finalise the proposed criteria.
The final set of proposed criteria will be produced by the end of August 2001 and could then be used as a basis for a process of discussion between certification schemes on issues of mutual recognition.
For further information contact Dr Ruth Nussbaum, email ruth(ED-proforest. net or Michael Garforth, email mike(ffi-mqarforth.freeserve.co.uk
58 St Aldates Oxford OX1 1ST United Kingdom Tel:+44 1865 202345 Web: www.proforest.net