The Forest Stewardship Council – forestry’s gold standard – will next week vote on whether to begin work on new traceability rules after a new report alleged that it lacks the systems needed to proactively detect fraud across its supply chains.
As reported by the conservation publication Mongabay, the Bonn-based body is facing increased scrutiny after an Earthsight report published last week estimated that billions of dollars’ worth of pulp, paper, and timber-based products bearing FSC certification were tied up in fraudulent claims. FSC rejected some of the report’s estimates as unsubstantiated, but the issue has prompted calls for a system that can track volumes of certified wood from forest to market.
At present, companies in the FSC supply chain can buy 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.”
According to Phil Guillery, FSC’s former integrity director, “20-30% of claims in the system were false” during his tenure, “and I haven’t seen anything to suggest the figure has dropped since.” The FSC issued a swift rebuttal, calling Guillery’s claims unsubstantiated and “based on outdated information that does not reflect the system today.”
A current senior FSC official who spoke to Mongabay on condition of anonymity said Guillery’s estimate was likely conservative. “I’m actually amazed he said 20-30 per cent — probably the numbers are higher,” the official said, and alleged that fraud remained widespread while “little of significance was being done to address it.”
FSC said integrity remained central to its mission and that it took allegations seriously. “Integrity is central to FSC’s mission, and we take any allegation of fraudulent behaviour seriously,” the organisation said, adding it had increased transaction verification, wood sample testing, and targeted investigations to identify and block companies making false claims.
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.
Earthsight’s analysis estimated total annual FSC fraud at $10–30 billion and highlighted cases it said involved tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Earthsight also noted that since Russia and Belarus were suspended from FSC certification in 2022, the area of certified forests had fallen by about 30% while the number of companies licensed to handle FSC wood had increased by roughly 37%, a discrepancy that raised concerns about timber from sanctioned sources entering supply chains.
A proposed resolution, Motion 30, would initiate work on a mandatory volume tracking and reconciliation system that all FSC companies would have to join. The motion, put forward by U.K. retailer Kingfisher and seconded by WWF, says existing controls are not sufficient to prevent false claims. The FSC is simultaneously rolling out a blockchain-based tool called FSC Trace, but the system is currently mandatory only for supply chains deemed “high risk.”
“There is no such thing as a ‘high-risk supply chain’ — they’re all high risk,” the anonymous FSC official said. Jason Grant, FSC lead for WWF, cautioned that introducing a system would be a significant change and impose costs and burdens on certificate holders. “One thing that we recognise is this is a big deal, it’s a big change, it’s going to impose additional costs and burdens of time and hassle on certificate holders all across the system,” he said. “We don’t want to break the system by forcing this on people too quickly without enough thoughtful work to make sure that it really works.”
To pass, Motion 30 must be approved by a majority in each of the FSC’s three chambers — environmental, social, and economic — with the economic chamber, which includes corporate members, having previously voted down similar measures. The motion, as drafted, would initiate a study to determine how a system could be implemented and put a final vote on adoption at the FSC’s next general assembly in 2028.
