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Three major certification systems rule in the United States: The Forest Stewardship Council, Sustainable Forest Initiative and American Tree Farm System. Although each has similar goals, the philosophy and history behind them is different.

The question over whether there should be one consolidated certification system or a variety of systems is a political one because there is still a lot of fighting and competition among the supporters of the different systems, notes Connie McDermott, program director, Yale Program on Forest Policy and Government and Program on Forest Certification.

AMERICAN TREE FARM SYSTEM

The American Tree Farm System is the oldest of the bunch, originating in the 1940s. However, it was formed as a voluntary program for family forestland owners. According to ATFS, it has certified 26.8 million acres of privately owned forestland and 90,473 family forest owners who are committed to excellence in forest stewardship in 46 states.

“It wasn’t originally a very formal certification system along the lines of ISO-style; it was more a volunteer outreach kind of program to help family forest owners,” explains McDermott. “Then over time as forest certification started to emerge as a formal thing, they’ve been working on this formalized option which would also be recognized under PEFC [Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification]; that’s what they are applying for at this point.”

Today, much like the other two certification systems, ATFS offers full third-party certification; however, it differs from the other two in that it specifically and exclusively targets family forests, McDermott says.
“Their standards tend to be written with that in mind. They’re not so heavily based on documentation and are less prescriptive in terms of what the environmental requirements are,” she says.

THE FSC vs. SFI DEBATE

Most of the debate and competition is between the FSC and SFI systems.

“One of the underlying reasons for that has to do with perceived and, to some extent, real differences in the way that decisions are made — who is most supporting the systems, who is on their governing board. That has to do with the amount of influence someone has — on the one side it is more weighted toward environmental groups and on the other side it is more weighted toward the producers,” McDermott says.

“Both have a three-chambered system at this point — environmental, social and economic — but who is sitting in each of those chambers is different.”

McDermott explains much of the debate stems from environmental groups wanting to have a strong say in what happens and industry also wanting to have a strong say in what happens. As a result, both groups have formed their own separate camps.

On the SFI side, there is much more industry involvement, and on the FSC side there is more NGO involvement, she says. Although SFI has changed over the years and has developed some features FSC has, such as third-party certification, there are still clear differences between the two systems, McDermott says.

The Yale Program on Forest Certification conducted a detailed comparison for the U.S. Green Building Council in which it found all of the major systems cover a lot of the same sustainability issues.
“If you look at it, we had over 100 criteria of sustainability. They were similar in mentioning a large range of issues. Each of those was covered, but they were covered differently,” McDermott says. “What you see is a tendency in the FSC and the FSC regional standards to be more specific about the on-the-ground practices that are supposed to occur as opposed to more flexible [standards], which is a difference with the SFI.”

The comparative matrix Yale produced is very detailed, and the group intentionally tried to do a minimum of interpretation and to be clear that it was comparing the intent of the words just as stated by the systems themselves.

“A lot of problems with interpretations now is different people will emphasize different issues,” McDermott says. “We wanted to be sure in our comparison of the standards that every issue raised and every standard was included in there, so we’re not oversimplifying one standard as opposed to the other. I think what we found in terms of the comparison is not a lot of people are debating that FSC is more prescriptive. I think that’s pretty well understood and accepted. What people debate about is whether that’s good or not.

McDermott explains a large portion of the debate comes down to trust.

“That’s really kind of a key issue. You tend to see environmental groups don’t trust industry to use flexible standards appropriately. That gets to be a bigger and bigger problem the larger scale the system is. At the local level, people get to know the forest manager and trust him, but it’s a different issue when they’re dealing in a national certification system.”