ALBERT

Description: This study uses a company’s due diligence system (DDS) as an operational tool to ensure the origin of wood coming from northwestern Russia. The company exports a majority of its wood products to European Union (EU) countries, and its DDS consists of a statement of origin, geographical information, and field verification audits. Its DDS is assessed against the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR). Enforcement of the EUTR began in March 2013 and is compulsory for all companies importing wood-based material from outside the EU. The DDS must contain three key components: access to information on operator’s supply of timber or timber products placed on the market, a risk assessment, and a risk mitigation method. The workflow of the conformity assessment must include a literature review, statistical and field data collection, and further analysis of the requirements. Although enforcement of the EUTR began almost two years ago, there is little research on its implementation. This DDS system showed high functionality of its existing components corresponding with the general requirements of the standards developed by the Nature Ecology and People Consult (NepCon), a non-profit organization recognized as the monitoring organization by the European Commission. This wood origin system also meets the requirements of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification system, while maintaining full harmonization with the EUTR legislation. However, major obstacles persist in implementation of legislation by EU member states, in terms of interpretation of requirements, prosecutions and fines, and the role of third-party evidence.

Description: The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [1]: The authors would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused to the readers by these changes.[...]

Description: The majority of Finnish forests (95%) are certified by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). It is a worldwide leading forest certification scheme. The aim of this study is to analyze the Finnish National Standard of PEFC certification and identify the indicators that can be reliably estimated with remote sensing (RS) techniques. The retrieved data are further verified with a chosen geographical information system (GIS) application. The rapid increase in certified areas globally has created a certain level of mistrust that makes the evaluation by certification bodies (CB) questionable. Firstly, the area of the field audit is limited, and the verification results are based on sampling techniques. Secondly, the evaluation of the indicators of sustainable forest management (SFM) is based on auditor expertise and thus is prone to bias. Thirdly, the actual condition of large forest stands in Eastern and Northern Finland are not easy to determine and verify. Thus, PEFC certification in Finland, in particular, faces numerous challenges in regard to the quality of field assessment due to the intensive forest management model with a high number of annual felling sites. At the same time, small scale and scattered harvesting sites are difficult to assess. Our proposed approach combined with remote assessment reliably verified 18% of the standard and could substantially reduce the costs associated with field audits in Finland. The results from our verification analysis are spatially explicit and geographically referenced and can be published in open access portals for interested parties. Moreover, it provides improved transparency in field assessments for the PEFC certification. The novel approach proposed here requires further investigation at larger scales (e.g., national level).

Description: The authors wish to make the following correction to their paper [1].[...]