PHOTO: Wally Menne

The description of Coillte's operations is spot on: "more than a million acres of pesticide-laden, monocultural and exotic Sitka spruce plantations".

Timber hitch

Coillte, the Irish state forestry company, has impacted on many a wild Irish bog, mountain and wetland, including from planting in the last few years more than a million acres of pesticide-laden, monocultural and exotic Sitka spruce plantations. What is as dismal as the trees, though, is that this "green desert" was certified by the Soil Association and the Forest Stewardship Council as "sustainable forestry". Now the Irish are revolting. "We call on the Soil Association and FSC to immediately withdraw this abomination of a certificate, and we call on all environmentalists everywhere to help us in our struggle," says a group writing to Eco Soundings and calling itself the Irish Environmental and Social Stakeholders. More at fsc-watch.org

The more than half million acres of Massachusetts Public Forests, including the Savoy Forest, were certified by Scientific Certification Systems Inc, in August 2004. SCS evidently had difficulty in massaging the state public bodies through the certification process: of the 17 'conditions' which SCS had attached to the certificate between 2002, when assessment began, and 2004, only two conditions had been 'closed out' by the time the certificate was issued. SCS's Public Summary Report of the certificate reveals that, at the time of certificaton, the various public bodies responsible for managing forestlands had no landscape level forest management plan, very few actual forest management plans, no means of identifying or delimiting areas of High Conservation Value Forest, had no credible calculations of annual allowable harvest, and had failed to identify, designate, or map representative ecological reserves.

However, in a pattern that has been identified with numerous other SCS certifications, the largest of the Mass. forest managers, the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), responsible for 285,000 acres of forest, managed to just scrape past SCS's 'pass-mark' score of 80/100: for eight of the nine applicable FSC Principles, DEM scored only 85 or less. Contravening FSC's current rules - which require compliance with all Principles, SCS awarded the certificate on the basis only that the state public forest land agencies "while having observed deficiencies, are on balance substantively compliant with each of the relevant FSC principles" (emphasis added).

The full public summary report is available here: forest_mass.pdf

As FSC-Watch has previously reported, the certificate has already been the subject of a formal complaint. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in no action by FSC - though FSC continues to maintain the fiction that it has an effective complaints procedure.

11 April 2008

The SGS/NORFOR scandal seriously undermines the FSC seal's credibility

Verdegaia and Ecologistas en Acción demand that the FSC sustainable forest management certification given to NORFOR (ENCE) be cancelled

The Galician environmental association Verdegaia and Ecologistas en Acción, a confederation comprising 300 environmental groups from Spain, consider the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) sustainable forest management certification given to the company Norte Forestal (NORFOR) a fraud. The certifying entity SGS granted the certification FSC to this ENCE group company for the 12,000 hectares of forest land it manages in Galicia, Asturias and Cantabria (Northern Spain), despite the fact that it does not meet the necessary requirements. If the FSC management does not put an end to this situation, Verdegaia and Ecologistas en Acción will stop supporting the FSC sustainable forest management system, the only forestry certification they have supported to date.

SGS maintains the FSC certification to NORFOR since 2004, in spite of it not having been able to prove, to this date, that the ENCE group company's practices with regards to sustainable forest management are in agreement with the principles and criteria of the FSC system. The lack of rigor and professionality of the SGS audit caused a complaint before the APDR. Greenpeace and WWF/Adena, supported by Verdegaia and Ecologistas en Acción amongst other environmental organizations. Consequently, the Accreditation Services of the International FSC (ASI) initiated an investigation regarding the SGS certification to NORFOR. The result of this investigation should lead to the short term cancellation of NORFOR's FSC certification. We believe that any other ending would be fatal to the FSC system's credibility, especially in the Spanish state, given the amount of evidence regarding both NORFOR'S non-compliance to FSC standards and the biased nature of the audit carried out by SGS.

By far, NORFOR's management of the forests it owns or leases, almost completely covered with intensive eucalyptus plantations, cannot be regarded as sustainable according to the FSC system's standards. Amongst other reasons, due to its lack of transparency and openess to the interested parties such as environmental protection associations; its scarce promotion of multifunctional and multiproductive use of the forests; its negligence with regards to soil erosion preventive measures and soil fertility maintenance; it constituting an important loss of biodiversity; or its not protecting those spaces with a high conservation value.

The level of environmental fastidiousness of the FSC system is higher than that of the legislation, but this is mainly due to the weaknesses of the existing legal framework rather than to the strength of FSC. This becomes very evident in the particular case of the eucalyptus tree in Northern Spain, where plantations of which can be located and managed without hardly any environmental restrictions, in spite of the disastrous results of the massified and unorderly spread of eucalyptus trees registered in the last few decades. It isn't surprising, then, that a company such as NORFOR can manage forests causing serious environmental damage without having the administrations of Galicia, Asturias, or Cantabria, with competence in matters of forestry policy, do anything to avoid it.

"The projects in Uganda meet the conditions of well managed forest and are certified according to the guidelines of Forest Stewardship Council," states the FACE Foundation's website.

Here's a screenshot of the FACE Foundation's website. The screenshot was taken on 26 March 2008 - I've just checked and FACE Foundation's website still claims that both its Uganda projects are FSC certified. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

And here's a screenshot of FSC's list of "Certified Forests", dated 10 January 2008 - no sign of Kibale on the list (click on the image for a larger view):

The FACE Foundation is, of course, fully aware that its project at Kibale is not FSC certified. In the information about Mount Elgon on the same webpage, there is a link to SGS's Public Summary of its 2007 reassessment at Mount Elgon. In the information about Kibale, there is no similar link. When a certificate is suspended, the Public Summary is no longer public. No information is available on FSC's, ASI's or SGS's website about why the certificate has been suspended at Kibale.

The Uganda Wildlife Authority in Uganda is responsible for managing Uganda's national parks. Since Mount Elgon is the only one of Uganda's national parks currently FSC certified, FSC could (but probably won't) decide that the statement on UWA's website is grossly misleading: "UWA adheres to the forest management practices consistent with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Principles and Criteria in managing these forests to ensure that benefits accruing from the conservation of these areas are generously shared with neighbouring local communities."

FSC-watch looks forward to reporting on what action FSC takes to correct FACE Foundation's and UWA's misleading claims about FSC certification.

FSC-watch recently received the photographs below of logging in Clayoquot Sound. The company involved is Ecotrust Canada, FSC-certified by SmartWood in 2006. "At the core of it all," says Kent Goodyear of Ecotrust, "we encourage the notion of people relating to where they live, and trying to live in a sustainable manner. This is the underlying principle that makes FSC a valuable conservation tool in my work."

The photographs came with the following note:

"How does this warrant FSC certification? It is a recipe for blowdown and slides on these weatherbeaten coastal mountains, not to mention the drastic loss of salmon. It took two of these monster barges to take out the bundles of old growth forests here in Rankin Cove in Clayoquot Sound, basically high-grading cedar."

Note the size of the person next to the logs

Aerial view of bundled old growth logs in Rankin Cove

Giant ancient cedar bundles

Log barge in Rankin Cove, 17 March 2008

Old growth bundles at Rankin Cove

Log bundles