Forest Stewardship Council

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Official logotype of FSC

The Forest Stewardship Council is a non-profit organization based in Bonn, Germany. The Council's stated mission is "to promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world's forests". People interested in the sustainable consumption of timber, lumber, paper or other forest products can seek to acquire FSC-certified products. FSC certification is also sometimes used to demonstrate sustainable management of forest for carbon sequestration purposes.

This membership association was founded in 1993 and is funded by various businesses, governments, foundations, and environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the WWF, as well as by accreditation fees. Major decisions are taken in a General Assembly, which meets every three years. Through consultative processes, FSC develops standards and policy for sustainable management of forests, and accredits certification bodies to assess candidate forests for certification.

Any timber company or other organization that wishes to become FSC-certified and bear their logo must first contact an accredited third party representative of the FSC. The FSC does not directly certify forests but certifies the auditors that do certify forests. Certification representatives then inspect the practices and maintenance of the forestry resource. The final step is to ensure that products made with lumber coming from FSC-accredited forests end up with the FSC-certified logo; chain of custody certificates are used to track the products from forest to final point of sale.

Jared Diamond's Collapse praises FSC as a collaboration of environmentalists and business for a sustainable economy and compares it to similar organisms created by timber business that, in his opinion, do not keep their standards so high. The Marine Stewardship Council is a similar organization covering sustainable fishery. It has attracted less commercial and consumer support, though.

PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes) is the main competing forest certification system which places equal weighting on environmental, social and economic concerns. Mutual recognition of FSC and PEFC certified material in the chain of custody has not yet happened. However, the national Forest Management Standard in the United Kingdom - UKWAS - is both accredited by FSC and endorsed by PEFC. Both FSC and PEFC were found to deliver UK government criteria for legal and sustainable sourcing of timber products.

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