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comment FSC Revises Controlled-Wood Standards
Ever since it decided to allow certification of wood products that include both certified and uncertified wood—partial-content certification—the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has had to deal with concerns about the source of the uncertified content. Early on, FSC included language banning material from “controversial sources” but offered no practical way to enforce that requirement.
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To address this problem, FSC introduced in 2004 the concept of “controlled wood,” which went a long way toward clarifying what is required but created new documentation challenges for suppliers. Two standards that took effect on January 1, 2007, should make the new controls more manageable.
Wood that is “controlled,” according to FSC policy, is not harvested under any of the following five conditions: (1) illegally, (2) in violation of civil rights and the rights of indigenous peoples, (3) in forests where high conservation values are threatened by management activities, (4) in forests being converted to plantations or non-forest use, and (5) from forests in which genetically modified trees are planted. Until the latest standards took effect, the burden was on the wood supplier to prove that any non-certified wood in an FSC-labeled product conformed to these controlled-wood requirements.
The new standards provide wood suppliers with the option of relying instead on FSC’s Global Risk Registry, which identifies areas in which violations of each of the five conditions are unlikely. Wood harvested in a country with strong legal enforcement, for example, could be presumed to have been harvested legally, and suppliers would not have to document that they had met that condition.
The risk registry process is described in FSC-STD-40-005 (version 2-0), Standard for Company Evaluation of FSC Controlled Wood. A related standard for forest management enterprises, FSC-STD-30-010 (version 2-0) includes related updates to the 2004 controlled-wood policies.
A large grant from the Home Depot Foundation has supported both the process of developing the new standards and the creation of the Global Risk Registry in the form of an online database. “By May [of 2007] there will be something that people can use, but it may be a little light in content,” reports Ned Daly, vice president of operations for FSC’s U.S. office. Daly expects FSC’s 35 national offices to populate the registry quickly once it is up and running on FSC’s website.
After the information goes public, users are expected to help ensure its integrity—included in the standard is a detailed policy for challenging information in the registry. The World Resources Institute and other organizations have research initiatives that should provide useful data to the registry as well, according to Daly. If it works as intended, the Global Risk Registry should prove a valuable resource, not only for those facilitating compliance with FSC standards but also for those seeking information on questionable wood-harvesting practices by region.
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