Labeling wood.

• Author: Sugal, Cheri
• Position: Timber certification

How timber certification may reduce deforestation.

A series of landmark developments, including satellite photography revealing massive burning of the Amazon and scientific findings confirming a link between deforestation and climate change, has greatly heightened public awareness about the loss of tropical forests in the past decade. The loss now amounts to more than 14 million hectares of tropical forest - equivalent to the entire state of Florida - every year.

As a result, the international tropical timber trade has become a target of public campaigns to curb deforestation, the argument being that consumers can "save" the rainforest if they refuse to buy tropical timber products. In the United Kingdom, for example, more than 30 local authorities have ceased use of tropical hardwoods. Since 1992, approximately 200 city councils in Germany and 51 percent of Dutch municipalities have banned use of tropical timber. And in the United States, a growing number of cities and states (including New York, California, Arizona, and Minneapolis) have banned or are considering prohibiting the use of tropical timber in public construction projects.

Applied indiscriminately to tropical timber, however, such prohibitions could boomerang by making forestry less competitive with agriculture, which causes far more deforestation than cutting trees for timber does. Prohibitions may also undermine the few incentives that fledgling forestry projects have to promote sustainable management. Many such promising projects would quickly wither away without demand and capital from the North. Bans also face an uphill battle to the extent that they conflict with international rules of free trade.

Given these drawbacks, there is a growing movement to use the market to promote tropical timber produced from sustainable sources, through labeling of wood products, rather than ban all tropical timber indiscriminately. The intent is to assure consumers that the wood products they purchase originate from well-managed forests, thereby helping to develop a market for these products, and ultimately to provide sufficient incentives for producers to adopt sustainable forest management practices. The organizations that have undertaken to provide independent certification ("third-party" certifiers) operate on the principle that good forest stewardship must mean more than sustained timber supply; it also means maintaining the health and integrity of the forest ecosystem, and ensuring that all pertinent stakeholders share in the benefits. Stakeholders include both people and wildlife that live in the forest, indigenous cultures that have traditional land use rights, and landowners and loggers that have legitimate economic needs. Most certifiers strive to achieve this balance by requiring adherence to a long term management plan, minimum-impact harvesting methods, efficient utilization of all forest products including non-timber forest products, and third-party audits.

All third-party certifiers also trace and track products throughout the "chain of custody" to ensure that the product originally evaluated and certified has been used at each step in processing, manufacturing, and distribution.

The effect of certification on tropical deforestation has been questioned, however, on the grounds that logging constitutes only a small portion of deforestation in the tropics. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an estimated 90 percent of all deforestation is done for agricultural purposes, with only 10 percent owing to logging.

Detractors also argue that only 14 percent (about 240 million cubic meters) of the tropical trees cut each year is used for industrial "roundwood" (the logs that get cut into boards for construction or wood products) while the remaining 86 percent (or nearly one-and-a-half billion cubic meters) is used for fuelwood and charcoal. Finally, of the wood harvested, only 28 percent enters international trade in the form of logs, sawnwood, or wood-based panels - the kinds of products to which...