Forest Certification: Toward Common Standards?

Carolyn Fischer, Roger Sedjo (), Puja Jawahar and Francisco Aguilar

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: The forestry industry provides a good illustration of the active roles that industry associations, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), national governments, and international organizations can play in developing and promoting codes of conduct that are formally sanctioned and certified. It also reflects some of the challenges of disseminating codes of conduct in developing countries and ensuring market benefits from certification. We describe the emergence of forest certification standards, outline current certification schemes, and discuss the role of major corporations in creating demand for certified products. We also discuss the limited success of certification and some of the obstacles to its adoption in developing countries. The current diversity of forest certification programs and ecolabeling schemes has created a costly, less-than-transparent system that has been largely ineffective in terms of the initial goals of reducing tropical deforestation and illegal logging. Some steps have been taken toward harmonization of different certification criteria as well as endorsement and mutual recognition among existing forest certification programs. However, it is unlikely that standardization alone can overcome other, more serious barriers to certification in developing countries.

Keywords: forest certification; codes of conduct; Forest Stewardship Council; PEFC; Sustainable Forestry Initiative; sustainable forest management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L73 Q13 Q23 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-04-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Working Paper: Forest Certification: Toward Common Standards? (2005)
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