FSC Movers & Shakers: FSC’s Knight in shining armour

FSC General Assembly 2011
 

He’s been at the forefront of sustainable development for over 20 years ranging from peat dilution strategy, paint labelling, to supplier environmental auditing and corporate sustainability. Meet Dr. Alan Knight, who says that above all his contributions to the sustainability sphere, he still considers the development of FSC as his greatest contribution.

“Being a part of the group of twenty to thirty people that helped start FSC has probably been one of the largest ideas and ironically one of the first things I did in my career. If I was in a rock band, FSC would have been my best selling single; the one that has been so different and so special”.

Knight became involved with the creation of FSC while working as the Environmental Manager for B&Q, the UK home and improvement retailer owned by Kingfisher. His journey began at a pivotal meeting with the Marketing Director at B&Q, when Knight started asking key questions about where the wood was coming from to supply the retailer and was not satisfied with the quality and integrity of the answers he was receiving. These initial inquiries coupled with the imminent threat of environmental campaigns against the retailer lead Knight make an exploratory trip to the source of their wood.

“What I did back then was a bit unusual because it was 21 years ago. I went into the forest myself to find out what was going on. It was one of the first times a retailer had been in the forest of Borneo to understand first-hand the issues of deforestation and what the truth was behind the allegations”.

“At that time, the narrative from environmental groups was boycott tropical timber; just don’t buy tropical timber and that by default will save the forests, the logic being that if no one buys it, there will be no demand for it”.

“Of course I quickly picked up on the very loud counterargument coming from the emerging economies and the timber trade, that deforestation was being caused by lots of other reasons other than timber for retailers in Europe – and that poverty was a major factor. These countries had a right to emerge and developing their natural resources was one of the ways they could do that. It was wrong for us not to accept that, because even if B&Q chooses not to buy their timber, emerging countries would continue to exploit the natural forests for something else”.

Back to the source

The Borneo trip confirmed that in many cases, the environmental groups’ narrative was fair with respect to the destructive nature of certain timber operations. However, Knight quickly realised that it would be unrealistic for him to fly around the world checking on all of B&Q’s sources with a one page questionnaire asking suppliers about their management plan.

“There was no way that a retailer could sufficiently develop the standards, principles and criteria for all the worlds’ forests, nor would they ever have the expertise or the time to check for themselves. Even if I could do all that work, who would believe us anyway? I was a part of the problem because B&Q was part of the timber trade. And so the independence mattered as much as the expertise and the time required”.

When Knight reached out to individuals with the idea for third party certification, it turned out that several groups including Rainforest Alliance were already developing the concept. In a meeting convened by WWF in 1990, forty individuals comprised mostly of NGOs and small timber companies met in Washington D.C. to discuss the ground work for setting up system to pull different independent certification schemes under the same set of processes and governance and ideally under the same label.

Knight found himself on the first interim board of FSC, overseeing the first draft of the P&C, drafting the constitution, governance structure, and proposals that would enable 200 people to vote FSC into existence at the first General Assembly in Toronto.

Future trends in retail

“Tracking and verifications, label proliferation; you can tolerate it and there are a lot of different schemes out there. I’m hearing more and more voices that while the major brands want to intervene, they wish there were fewer schemes”.

“FSC needs to have a better public policy. Voluntary standards fill the space that policy will do a better job at. Some that believe voluntary standards are becoming a lazy alternative to public policy. FSC needs to have a clear idea of where it stands in the public policy arena, where they stand and where they stand”.
Agility and speed is strength

Knight believes that barcode technology linked to smartphones is only two three years away from being developed to trace a product back to the forest.

He predicts that in ten years, technology will exist to provide real time product information that could streamline the enforcement process, using technology based on Google Earth.

Though technology may be able to take over certain aspects of the certification process, Knight believes the real value of the FSC system resides in the standard-setting process, and that it is crucial for FSC to decouple the enforcement and communication process from the standard.

“FSC was created by a group of individuals that wanted change, but it has settled in to the status quo before winning the fight. If they continue to stay in the status quo they will continue to become more irrelevant. What matters most is the standard-setting process. That’s where FSC needs to give itself permission to be more nimble, otherwise the standard and the standard-setting process will get thrown out with the bathwater – along with the labels and audit process”.

“Are we absolutely sure that the current systems we have in place will provide the best means of delivering what we believe in - the standards - in the light of new technologies and the processes that retailers might develop”?

Knight’s supernatural power

When asked what supernatural power would help you most in the course of your daily work, Knight answered, “An ego disappearing wand would be my supernatural power. I wish I could rid the world of ego. I sometimes worry how much ego and need for personal self-esteem drives people to hang on to arguments that stand against the intellectual arguments we need to have”.

“I happily put myself on the ego purge list. The types of meetings we host and the arguments we have to have, sometimes allow egos to take control. The most successful discussions I have been involved with or have lead have been where people have left their egos at home”.

What you might not know

When asked what one thing people should know about his work but don’t, Knight explained, “whilst people like to see me as provoker of new ideas, being a freelance consultant working with varying companies and governments, some of my ideas are better informed than the style of my presentation may suggest”.