After years of confused and dysfunctional debate, FSC seem to have finally reached a resolution to the question of whether to include Social Indicators in its Chain of Custody standard.  An announcement was released today by email from the Policy office in Bonn.  It includes links to the key documents which include the important details: FSC-STD-40-004 - the key Chain of Custody standard for certified companies FSC-STD-20-011 - the accreditation standard that sets auditing protocols for...

This brief post is to update – one last time, we hope – the story we shared in September and October about FSC’s ill-considered policy decision about species documentation for Chain of Custody (CoC) companies.  Click here to read our original post on the subject.  Click here to read a much deeper and more detailed analysis by Ulf Sonntag, our colleague from Germany. The Forest Stewardship Council has a long and storied history of events like this.  A well-intentioned “improvement” is proposed...

This post is an update to our last article, calling attention to a new and unwelcome policy decision from FSC.  In our usual style, we described the new document - “ADVICE-40-004-19” – in general terms and provided links to the original. Ulf Sonntag is a leading FSC expert from Germany and a trusted colleague of MixedWood.  Yesterday, he wrote to us, sharing his own analysis of Advice-19 - much deeper and more detailed than ours.  Please read it yourself and download using the link below to...

For the past several years, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has invested considerable effort and energy into communicating directly and forthrightly with their community of stakeholders.  At the core of this well-intentioned strategy has been its Global Strategic Plan (GSP), published in 2015 and promoted consistently to the present.  Here at MixedWood, we like the GSP, not least because it features objectives and values we share.  In particular, Strategy 1, which promises to “Streamline...

We hope you found the time and attention to take a look at the latest proposal from FSC concerning the addition of labor rights criteria to their Chain of Custody standard.  If this subject is new to you, please take a look here at our last article on the subject.  You can also visit the original material online here. This remains an important concern for many in our network and has stimulated quite a lot of discussion and debate recently.  Among our correspondents, opinions seem to fall into...

We need to begin with an apology to our regular readers.  The article below was posted here in early March.  This was just before COVID19 turned our world upside down, so we suspect that many of you did not have much attention to spare.  Because the subject is important, we are repeating it here, with a few updates. We are watching an important new initiative by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that promises to disrupt and complicate the Chain of Custody (CoC).  The proposal is to revise...