23 NovemberFSC has opened the draft FSC global forest management standard for voting among its members.
The 10 global Principles and Criteria form the backbone of all national and regional FSC forest management standards. As such, it provides a crucial framework defining the scope of asssurance offered by the FSC certification scheme.
This is the first major revision of the FSC P&C since the inception of FSC in 1993.
Voting has now opened to all FSC members – if you are a member, you can now have your say on the proposed changes.
You can make an informed decision before 31 January 2012 by visiting a dedicated website that will guide you through the key issues, including forest carbon, biodiversity protection,logging in primary forest, greenwashing, smallholders, bureaucracy, ILO conventions, and more.
Leading up to the voting, FSC is offering a number of scheduled webinars where you may discuss directly with members of the P&C Review Working Group on the specific proposed changes as well as on how and why the existing standard has been revised.
Key changes
The over-arching structure - with 10 key principles and a number of criteria for each principle - remains. However, the framework has been substantially changed in several respects. We have highlighted some key changes below:
- Principle 1 on legality has been strengthened by two new requirements: the certified operation must be a legally defined entitty (1.1), and it must abstain from receiving bribes and observe anti-corruption laws or implement anti-corruption measures (1.7).
- Principle 10 on Plantations has been replaced by a principle on Management. The global standard is used as a framework that applies to any certified forest, whether it is a natural forest, a plantation, or something rather in between those two clear-cut categories. The new Principle 10 implies an enhanced focus on field performance, which many stakeholders have called for.
- Principle 2 is now exclusively reserved for forest workers' rights while Principle 4 is reserved for local communities, thus dedicating an entire principle for each of these core issues.
- The number of criteria has increased by 25%, from 56 to 70. At the FSC General Assembly in July 2011, concerns were raised that this might result in longer and more complex national Forest Management standards - a well-known obstacle to certification of small forest enterprises. FSC has responded to this concern in its guide on key issues.
The votings opened on 1 November and closes on 31 January 2012.
Visit vote.fsc.org
Read the draft revised Principles & Criteria