About CeFCo
Challenges
Challenges for smallholders
While forest certification has become widespread around the globe for large public and company-owned forests, relatively few small privately owned forests have been certified.
Certification of privately-owned small and medium forest management units is currently one of the major bottlenecks for increasing the mobilization of certified timber to meet increasing market demand.
Already today, certified timber supply is much lower than the market demand. The owners of small private forest holdings in most cases have limited access to the market for certified wood. The challenge to increase the certified wood from small forest holders is particularly significant in Europe, where approximately 16 million small forest holders own 55 percent of the forests.
Some of the reasons why small private forests have difficulty accessing certification and certified markets include:
- Certification requirements are generally developed for large-scale, high impact forest operations. Many of the requirements can be challenging for smaller operations.
- Control of high impact operations: Owners of small forest holdings have in many cases only limited influence on the forest operations carried out by forestry contractors. Frequently, a forest owner who sells small quantities of wood does not have the knowledge required to ensure that the contractors follows all the certification requirements.
- Lack of certificates for green services available: forestry contractors themselves, with some exceptions, do not have a certificate to guarantee that they meet the requirement of forest certification when working on private forest land.
- Certification costs: Owners of small forest areas do not usually gain a regular income from the forest. On a 25 ha property, logging might be carried out every 5th or 10th year. Reducing the burden for meeting certification standards for small forest holdings should help reduce the cost of certification.
To address these issues the project intends to support the development of standards specifically for small operations, and to develop and test procedures for sharing the tasks needed to fulfill the certification requirements between the forest owners and the forestry contractors.
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