Will US Green Building Council let the forests down?

"There are big stakes here, and the repercussions will spread across the forest products industry for years," president of FSC-US Corey Brinkema recently told The Tyee. Brinkema was referring to a new draft benchmark for forest products under the US LEED green building standard that could constitute a major blow to FSC.

Until now, the certified wood credit provided by the LEED standard has focused on FSC only. Now the US Green Building Council (USGBC) is developing a new benchmark that does not name any single certification scheme. Instead the credits awarded will rely on objective criteria allowing any scheme meeting the benchmark to enter the LEED system.

Proposal slammed by both sides

All that is very well, says FSC-US, but unfortunately the bar is set far too low in the third draft version of the LEED forestry benchmark. FSC-US also regrets that the draft endorses certification schemes based on prerequisite criteria only, does not explain how schemes and their performance will be assessed, and fails to address governance issues adequately.

On the contrary, says the main rival scheme of FSC in the US, PEFC-endorsed SFI: Despite considerable relaxation of the requirements, the bar is still set too high and may lead to continued exclusion of non-FSC schemes such as SFI.
 

Wood - a minor issue in green building standards

However, FSC and SFI do agree on one point: The importance of green building requirements for the world’s forests is far from properly reflected in the draft LEED standard.

From a green forestry perspective, it is obvious that a lot of responsibility for the world’s forests rests on the shoulders of the construction industry.

Residential housing construction consumes more than 70% of the total volume of softwood lumber and structural panels available in the US under healthy financial conditions, according to ITTO estimates. 
As the US is also the world’s largest consumer of commercial wood, the US building sector is clearly a key factor driving the development towards sustainable forestry - even despite the current financial crisis.


“In the US and with some tropical products, especially flooring, the LEED standard has been a major driver of FSC certification and responsible forest management”, says Liza Murphy, former director of FSC Global Development and expert on the use of certified wood in the US construction sector.

However, the draft benchmark only allows green builders to gain a single point based on their use of certified wood, out of the minimum 40 points required to become LEED certified. As SFI dryly notes, the same credit can be achieved by ‘adding a bicycle rack and a shower’.

The reason for this is that the construction sector is truly huge: even a big part of the world’s total harvested wood is just a fraction of the total volume of materials used for construction. 

“You might say that green building is much more important to green forestry than vice versa”, Murphy says. “Within the construction industry, other aspects such as energy efficiency are often seen as much more important”.

Regional Manager of the Rainforest Alliance's SmartWood Program David Bubser explains: "Wood is a much more environmentally friendly building material that either steel or concrete, and for that reason, many believe that the use of wood should be more strongly incentivized, or conversely, the use of concrete and steel disincentivized when wood could meet the engineering specification just as well. But all wood is not equal in terms of impacts to the forest of origin, which is why getting the forest certification benchmark right is so important".
 

Quantity versus quality

The proposal for reduced requirements under the LEED standard has caused widespread concern among supporters of more rigorous forest certification standards, including members of the USGBC.

For example, in a letter to the USGBC, a group of leading designers and architects urge the council to adopt the FSC standard as the baseline requirement. The designers say that “this third public comment draft has eroded the requirements to a level that concerns us greatly….Using FSC standards as a minimum baseline coupled with competition will help the forestry industry to evolve beyond current practices and promote broader sustainable forestry initiatives”.

The support letter from this group is significant according to Bubser. "These firms are established leaders in the green building sector and part of USGBC’s core membership", he explains.

FSC is seen by most observers as the more rigorous system, and the general approach of the USGBC is to gradually raise the bar of environmental performance rather than lower it.  "The  benchmark should be consistent with USGBC’s Mission and Guiding Principles, and maintain the LEED standard as a leading driver of market transformation", says Bubser .

"One of the key reasons for relaxing the requirements is doubtlessly the volume of SFI-certified wood available on the US domestic market”, explains Liza Murphy. “SFI has certified twice the acreage of FSC in the US. Increased volumes of certified wood accepted under the LEED standard would make it easier and cheaper to gain certified wood credits”.

LEED set to become the global benchmark

Green building is on the rise. According to FSC-US, by 2013 green building is expected to represent 25 percent of all commercial and institutional building starts and 20 percent of residential construction in the US, up from 2 percent in 2005. The importance of green building for the world’s forests could grow even further, as wood is increasingly recognized as an eco-friendly building material compared to concrete and steel.

Murphy says: "LEED and programs modeled on it are already becoming global in scope . LEED may soon be defining the standards for green building worldwide". What LEED defines as acceptable for green builders in the US may thus have huge impact on global demands for wood certified to specific schemes for years to come.