The regular FSC International News & Views newsletter for April includes an interesting and unusual article.  It's found down at the bottom under the sub-heading Stakeholder News:  ASI suspends SGS Hong Kong.  There is a link to the full article. ASI (or Accreditation Services International) is the nominally-independent accreditation arm of the FSC organization.  Accreditation provides the rules of conduct and oversight for Certification Bodies - essentially the rules of the road for...

A colleague sent me this link by email this morning.  It really made my morning and I couldn't wait to share it.  It's a short video (only 3:15) so worth looking at before reading further. Pretty good, huh? I talk with friends, clients, and colleagues about our alphabet soup of standards, programs, and regulations every day:  FSC, SFI, PEFC, EUTR, CoC, FM, SGS, BV, RA, SCS.  We regularly grumble about the details, even as we find our way through.  I think this video clip really captures things...

Following their surprising announcement from earlier this winter, Greenpeace is continuing its active role in driving the conversation about Indonesian wood sourcing. An article by Mark Rushton in today's online edition of Pulp and Paper International features an interesting interview with Andy Tait, described as a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace.  Tait gives a revealing and apparently candid description of the interactions between Asia Pulp and Paper and Greenpeace over the last year,...

A number of leaders in the forest certification field are attending and participating in the World Forests Summit this week in Stockholm, Sweden.  I've been noticing a number of posts coming over my twitter feed calling attention to various comments and promoting some of the speakers.  Here's a good example. This sort of stuff is mostly promotional, of course.  I like to call it "happy talk".  It's good to see our programs get international press, so I make a point to re-tweet. I noticed...

It's been well understood and acknowledged for many years that the chief weakness of the FSC certification system has been the major variances in application around the world.  Although a single set of Principles and Criteria (P&C) apply worldwide, the on-the-ground interpretation of the P&C has been left to the various national affiliates around the world.   Where national affiliates haven't yet written local sets of indicators (still most of the world), the Certification Bodies have...