The Forest Stewardship Council – the gold standard in forestry – has passed a new motion that will have major implications for the future supply of timber and forest-based products. Wood Central can now reveal that the Motion in question, Motion 30, which was passed earlier this week, will eventually open the door to FSC using digital information (including Blockchain technologies) and volume control to improve the integrity of claims.
According to Preferred by Nature, one of the world’s largest forest certification bodies accredited to conduct FSC audits, the Motion “is crucial to make the certification system more transparent, secure and fit for a world of digital traceability and deforestation regulation.
Proposed by Kingfisher and seconded by the WWF, it is the second time the Motion has been put before FSC’s General Assembly. “Kingfisher launched a similar Motion in Bali in 2022,” according to Ewan Brown, a former FSC auditor who represented the British home improvement giant at the FSC General Assembly in Panama City. “It flew through the social and environmental chambers, but the economic chamber missed quorum by just a few votes. We came so close.”
The motion called for FSC to undertake a detailed feasibility study into an electronic, volume-tracking system that would prevent fraudulent or mistaken claims within the supply chain. “We all know there’s fraudulent material in the system,” Brown told Preferred by Nature in the lead-up to the vote. “Even if it’s five per cent, that’s still too much.” He drew a clear distinction between accidental misclaims — “someone getting an invoice wrong” — and deliberate fraud.
“The clearest example is birch plywood,” he notes. “We’ve seen regions reporting thousands-of-per cent increases in certified material despite logging restrictions. That’s not a clerical error. That’s deliberate.”
Ewan Brown – a timber scientist by training who started auditing for FSC in Australia in 2009 before working for a British certification body across Australasia and the Americas. He now manages Kingfishers multi-site FSC certificate.
Last month, Wood Central reported that Motion 30 was crucial in the fight to end the multi-billion-dollar trade in fraudulent claims on forest products, which has led some ENGOs to call into question the integrity of FSC (and PEFC) certification.
Currently, companies in the FSC supply chain can purchase and sell FSC-certified timber without reporting volumes to the FSC itself, leaving no centralised way to reconcile certified material entering the system with what reaches the market. Third-party auditors review individual traders’ invoices, the FSC said, but forestry experts note there is no routine, system-wide transaction analysis to detect volume discrepancies.
“It’s a trust-based system,” said Sam Lawson, head of U.K. investigative NGO Earthsight. “What companies are doing rampantly is selling far more FSC products than they buy FSC timber. So they’re basically slapping an FSC label on wood that’s coming from somewhere else entirely.”
Transaction verification can trace a product down its supply chain and compare volume numbers recorded by each company, but the process is slow and often reliant on paper records. “It’s a very, very tiny share of the total volume floating through the FSC system that they can cover with this approach,” said Peter Feilberg, executive director of sustainability nonprofit Preferred by Nature. He said tracking often took one to two years, by which time falsely labelled products had already reached consumers.
- To read more about the Earthsight report, and why the vote on Motion 30 holds the key to stamping out fraudulent timber from global supply chains, click here for Wood Central’s special feature from last week.
