FSC “fundamental law” revised and approved
The FSC membership has approved the revised Principles and Criteria – the backbone for all national and regional FSC forest management standards across the globe – with unprecedented support by social members.
“We welcome the approval of the revised FSC Principles and Criteria and believe an important stride has been taken to strengthen the conditions in the forest. There is still room for improvement, but we hope that many of the outstanding issues can be addressed as the standard is locally adapted”, Gabriel Bolton, Senior Forest Management Specialist at the Rainforest Alliance.
The P&C hold a special significance in the forest certification world: in 1994 for the first time in history, economic, social and environmental interests thrashed out their often opposing views to come to a common understand on what responsible forest management is. Eighteen years on, revisions to the standard are intended to strengthen it and address new challenges resulting from evolving certification and forestry worlds.
The over-arching structure – with 10 key principles and a number of criteria for each principle – remains. However, the framework has been substantially modified in several respects, as previously reported.
Legality strengthened
"While the intent of Principles 1 on legality remains essentially unchanged, the scope of requirements for forest management operations to demonstrate legality has been expanded and better defined, and we are pleased to see it incorporates elements of the Rainforest Alliance Verification of Legal Origin (VLO) standard,” says Mr Bolton.
Strengthened rights for indigenous peoples
Changes to Principle 3 strengthen the case for indigenous peoples’ rights, including more explicit requirements to not only identify rights, but to also uphold them. They require the operation to engage more proactively with indigenous peoples in obtaining free and prior informed consent before management activities are implemented.
“We believe the impact will be widespread wherever there are indigenous peoples living in or close to the forest and practicing traditional lifestyles, such as in Canada, the Congo basin, the Amazon basin and South East Asia”, says Mr Bolton.
Better deal for workers and local communities
Principle 2 is now exclusively reserved for forest workers' rights. The principle extends to all workers, including part-time employees and contractors. It focuses on eight Core Labour Conventions, filling gaps in the system such as gender equality, minimum wage, and grievance and compensation. With one principle now solely reserved for local communities, Principle 4 has introduced expectations for the operation to contribute to local community.
“We hope to see the revisions truly result in a better deal for local communities, particularly in the tropics”, says Mr Bolton.
Focus on field performance
Principle 10 on Plantations has been replaced by a principle on Management and implies an enhanced focus on field performance, which many stakeholders have called for. The global standard will now be applied to any certified forest, whether it is a natural forest, a plantation, or something in between those two categories. This change removes an incredible amount of redundancy – both for operations and auditors – that existed between Principle 10 on plantations and the remaining nice principles.
“For all operations, this will result in a better written and organised standard. But we expect this will also result in higher evaluation costs as the number of criteria to evaluate has increased substantially”, says Mr Bolton.
Overall, 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 and low intensity managed forest operations (SLIMF).
“We anticipate that any additional burden to SLIMFs can be addressed through the development of the international generic indicators, which will take the scale and intensity of management activities into account,” says Mr Bolton.
And now?
The results of the membership vote, coupled with a strong voter turn-out of around 70%, reflect strong support for this standard, which was developed through a three-year stakeholder-inclusive revision process; but it doesn’t end there. The next steps are to develop international generic indicators that will be used to fill gaps in existing national and regional forest management standards.
“The Rainforest Alliance and NEPCon will be actively inputting into the process of locally adapting the standard, especially around on indicators related to Principles 6 on Environmental Values and Impacts and 9 on High Conservation Values to ensure the best possible results are achieved”, said Mr Bolton.
