3. Is FSC too narrow in its approach?

Summary 4, oct. 16-20, 2002; thread 3
Summary 7, oct. 20/27- nov. 1, 2002; all threads

By Hannah Scrase

FSC started by accrediting forest and chain of custody certification in 1993-94. It was assumed at the time that this would be a huge task and that if we were successful we would be making a major contribution to improving the state of the world's forests. At the time it would have been impossible to try to take on the wider range of issues to relate to impacts of timber and paper consumption - FSC would never have got off the ground at all. Now pressure on, and opportunities for FSC to diversify are increasing all the time. We want your views on how FSC should respond.

Other related issues clearly impact on forests and on the wider environment such as certification of recycled material, verification of legality of timber, certification of protected areas, carbon storage certification, certification of downstream processing of forest products and even life-cycle analysis. FSC could take on some of these directly, could stay away from all of them, could build another organisation to do this work or could build partnerships with other organisations to provide a more comprehensive range of services to customers. The opportunities include increasing our reach and impact, increasing our visibility through wider use of the trademark and increasing our income by offering a wider range of accreditation services. The risks include overstretching the secretariat's ability to ensure the quality of FSC accredited certifications and a possible dilution of focus. In addition to these general concerns there are also questions about whether some of these initiatives actually contribute to forest management and protection or may undermine it inadvertently.

Should FSC diversify into other related areas, directly or indirectly through partnerships or should we stick to our core competency of forest certification and let other organisations take on the wider related issues. There is the general question of whether diversification is appropriate and then there are questions about whether each type of initiative is something that would help FSC to deliver its mission and who should decide whether FSC gets involved as new opportunities arise.

The FSC objectives conference is funded by DFID-FRP (UK) projectnr ZF0185, and facilitated by Treemail (NL)
For more information please contact: info@fscobjectives.org