21/07/2005 - WWF today
updated its evaluation of credible forest
certification in Europe. This follows the
completion of a series of three studies WWF
in Europe has been involved in to gain insights
into how the two forest certification systems,
FSC and PEFC, perform and deliver against
key elements WWF considers important for a
system's credibility.
The three key elements on which WWF tested
the performance of FSC and PEFC were:
• whether the scheme drives significant improvements
in forest management on the ground;
• whether a scheme design meets as a minimum
WWF's core values on meaningful and equitable
participation of all major stakeholder groups,
reliable and independent assessment, certification
decisions free of conflicts of interest, transparency
in decision making and reporting; and
• whether the system delivers consistency
across countries.
The following three studies were used for
gaining insights on the abovementioned key
elements:
1. The WWF/World Bank Alliance trial of the
Questionnaire for Assessing the Comprehensiveness
of Certification Schemes/Systems (QACC) in
12 European countries;
2. The parallel certification test conducted
by UPM in Europe and Canada; and
3. An analysis of Corrective Action Requests
(CAR) of FSC and PEFC across six countries
in Europe.
Findings from these studies have for the
first time highlighted key differences and
similarities between individual national schemes.
While they indicated improvements in both
FSC and PEFC throughout Europe over the last
five years, these studies also confirmed that
significant differences still exist between
the two.
These studies clearly demonstrate that FSC
meets the abovementioned three key elements
of fundamental importance to WWF. PEFC demonstrated
inconsistency, was more difficult to measure
due to lack of transparency, and, in most
cases, was inferior to FSC. WWF can therefore
only recommend FSC to consumers, forest owners,
governments, companies, financial institutions
and other concerned stakeholders as delivering
on credible forest certification.
“The QACC findings, the CAR analysis and
the insights from the UPM field test clearly
indicate the difference in quality between
the schemes and the systems on values of fundamental
importance to WWF. FSC is the system that
best meets WWF´s criteria for credible
certification,” said Duncan Pollard, Head
of the WWF European Forest Programme.
“Despite positive improvements within several
certification schemes in the last few years,
the results of the tests show that the different
PEFC schemes are highly inconsistent in quality
and comprehensiveness and that PEFC as a system
cannot guarantee well-managed forests. This
makes it impossible for WWF to recommend PEFC
to forest managers, buyers and consumers,
even though individual PEFC national schemes
like the UK and Sweden perform better than
other PEFC national schemes,” added Per Rosenberg,
Director of the WWF Global Forest and Trade
Network.
While making these conclusions, WWF also
acknowledges that both FSC and PEFC need improvements.
FSC needs to improve notably in its approach
to interim standards. PEFC needs to improve
across a range of issues, in particular on
transparency of decision-making and reporting,
balanced and equitable stakeholder participation,
reliable assessment, and removal of conflicts
of interests.
It specifically needs to improve on its ability
to demonstrate improvements on the ground.
It also needs to develop a consistent approach
across countries. While some national PEFC
schemes were better in performance than other
PEFC national schemes, the common use of the
PEFC logo does not allow buyers to differentiate
between them.
In those countries where there is still conflict
between schemes WWF will support, as appropriate,
the preparation of a National Standard which
can be recognised by both FSC and PEFC.
“We will use these insights from the European
studies to revise WWF's forest certification
policy,” said Nils Hager, WWF International's
Manager for forest certification issues.
