Friday, 15 February 2002
Pinchot Releases Results of Comparison Field Assessments
The Pinchot Institute for Conservation has completed a series of field assessments comparing FSC and the American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry InitiativeSM, the results of which will be available in the Spring. Catherine Mater, Senior Fellow with Pinchot facilitated the project on State and Tribal forestlands in Maine, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Vermont. The objectives of the project were to compare FSC and SFI auditing teams’ results for audits done on the same land at the same time, and to gain input from the land managers on their impressions of each system.
Eventual certification of the assessed lands was not a requirement of the project but a number of agencies are expected to go forward with full certifications. Tennessee recently completed FSC certification of 100%, or 180,000 acres, of their state forests (see the 2/1/02 edition of this newsletter).
The Pinchot Institute has been involved with FSC certification for several years. The organization participated in the certification of 2.1 million acres in Pennsylvania, 500,000 acres in Minnesota, and 700,000 acres in New York. They also facilitated an FSC audit of 1.2 million acres of Washington state land. To see the full results of the study, visit the current news section of www.pinchot.org. For a paper-based comparison study on forest certification, visit www.merid.org/comparison.