Topic 6.2: Certification of Forest Management

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Content

Topic Introduction

In the previous topic, you examined how to write a forest management plan, adaptive management, which involved planning, implementing and monitoring management actions. But what exactly are those actions? The most common is the extraction of wood from a forest, and a huge amount of work has examined the impacts of this. However, there are many other interventions that can take place in a forest.

Done well, management interventions improve the condition of a forest, steering it towards a defined objective. These objectives are normally described in a management plan, and consist of short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Actions are generally taken at the level of individual trees and stands, but occasionally landscape level actions may be taken. Examples of the latter include the massive re-structuring of plantation forests in the United Kingdom to improve their aesthetics and biodiversity values. In this topic, you will learn about some of the management actions that can be taken, starting with the development of a forest management plan. This is a critical document that outlines the desired future condition of a forest, and the actions that will be taken to achieve this.

The ultimate goal of a forest manager is to manage a forest sustainably. Increasingly, the purchasers of forest products and services are demanding that evidence be provided that a forest is being managed sustainably. The indicators provided by the Montreal Process and similar agreements provide some evidence of sustainable management of forests within a jurisdiction, but they cannot provide evidence that a particular forest is being well-managed. In particular, criteria and indicator schemes do not provide targets against which actual management can be measured.

In most countries, some attempt is made by the government to monitor the quality of forest management. This however varies in its effectiveness and governance issues, such as corruption or a lack of field staff, may result in inconsistent results. Consequently, with a few exceptions, the public has limited confidence in government-led compliance monitoring and effectiveness assessments.

Third party certification systems provide one means by which the quality of the management of a forest can be assessed. There are a number of different certification schemes, with two major groups: the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). There is a great deal of rhetoric about the differences between these two schemes, but in practice they are very similar, and a significant number of forest areas have been certified to both standards.

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