Certifiable progress

Gov. King recently provided useful perspective on a debate over which of the forestry-certification systems should be widely adopted.

At a certification conference this week

in Augusta, he noted that the question, very much present just a couple of years ago, over whether certification of forest practices was needed is over: It is now part of forestry. Second, he correctly asserted that independent, third-party assessments are the only ones that will have credibility with the public.

The two major competing certification systems are the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), an industry-created model, and one under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an independent overseeing group. The similarity of the abbreviations has ensured that all but the closest students of forestry have confused the two models, making the debate over which will lead to improved forestry all the more confused.

Fortunately, representatives of the two systems along with The Home Depot, whose interest in sorting this out for its customers is clear, earlier this year sponsored a report comparing the two models. The consensus results, released last spring, showed some similarities but also plenty of differences. Generally, FSC is the more rigorous in such areas as ecological function, chemical use, biological diversity and social impacts. SFI places greater emphasis on logger training and funding research. On the key issues of requiring an independent, third party to certify the results and to ensure that the results are available to the public, FSC is the superior system, often because it requires these standards rather than merely allows for them, as SFI does.

The good news for the industry’s SFI is that it keeps getting better. The best outcome for the public’s interest in Maine’s forests is that SFI eventually matches FSC and wood buyers become willing to pay a small premium for certified products, which, while already happening in Europe, is not obvious here. Also, it would be helpful if at least one of the programs got another set of initials to make it easier to tell them apart.