The FSC system is a reliable supporter of CITES
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) have different but overlapping missions. FSC focuses on sustainable forest management in a broad sense: environmental, social, and economic sustainability. CITES aims to limit and regulate international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants so that such trade does not threaten the survival of the species concerned. The overlap clearly exists with the common goal to prevent the extinction of species living in forest-related ecosystems.
Lets’s see how FSC effectively assists CITES in achieving its objectives.
How FSC helps CITES
In FSC-certified areas
FSC and CITES work from the same starting point: protecting species where necessary and allowing harvesting and trade where this is compatible with sustainable management.
FSC supports the implementation of the rules set by CITES. And goes beyond them. Besides the CITES Appendices, additional legal restrictions at each national level, as well as trade within the country, fall inside the scope of the FSC requirements.
FSC requires compliance with all applicable laws, including ratified international conventions. This is laid down in its Principles and Criteria for Responsible Forest Stewardship (P&C)* These P&C form the basis for the FSC national forest stewardship standards and their requirements that FSC-certified forest operations have to comply with.
Beyond FSC-certified areas
FSC’s concerns about legality and protecting species go beyond the FSC-certified forest areas. FSC allows mixing of certified materials with recycled materials and ‘controlled wood’. Controlled wood comes from countries, regions, and/or forest management units that have been assessed as ‘low risk’ against five criteria.
Three of the five criteria are relevant in the context of CITES:
1. risk of illegally harvesting and trade,
2. risk of connection with forest conversion, and
3. risk of undermining high conservation values of the ecosystem.
Furthermore, all companies that form part of FSC supply chains (of buying, processing, and selling products from FSC-certified forest operations) need to have an FSC chain of custody certificate and comply with the requirements of the FSC chain of custody standard.
Going beyond the CITES International trade restrictions
The FSC mission is responsible forest management. This includes ensuring that, if and where they are endangered, species are protected and given an environment in which they can recover and flourish. While FSC is most known in relation to products made from trees, in fact the FSC forest management standards cover all relevant forest species, including all the plants and animals present. For products on the market, FSC works with the concept of non-timber forest products, and allows certification of products such as rubber, honey, nuts and fruits.
Thus, beyond applying the CITES Appendices and national legislation, FSC requires managers of FSC-certified forests to develop and implement management plans that include a range of measures designed to protect and enhance biodiversity and ecosystems in general, and ‘threatened’ and ‘rare’ species in particular. The definitions of such species are built upon the work of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), using the IUCN categories for Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, and Near Threatened species.**
Within the wider context of requirements to ensure economic, social, and environmental sustainability and the specific obligation to “maintain, conserve and/or restore ecosystem services and environmental values” and to “avoid, repair or mitigate negative environmental impacts” (Principle 6), FSC has specific requirements regarding threatened and rare species.
Management consequences
FSC principles refer to monitoring the effects of forest management plans based on the evaluation results. The monitoring requirements have elements relevant to CITES and threatened and rare species, including to monitor “the impacts of infrastructural development, transport activities and silviculture to rare and threatened species, habitats, ecosystems, landscape values, water and soils”.
The FSC normative requirements regarding ecosystem and resource management support operators to provide documentation that shows that their harvest and species management is non-detrimental for the survival of CITES-listed species.
Some Indicators (IGI) require that the forest operator protect rare species and threatened species and their habitats in the Management Unit through conservation zones, protection areas, connectivity and/or (where necessary) other direct measures for their survival and viability.
Potential negative impacts of management activities are identified, and when needed modifications of such activities are described to avoid such impacts. They also require the provision of conservation zones, protection areas, connectivity, and other direct means for their survival and viability, such as species’ recovery programmes. Indicators also prescribe that hunting, fishing, trapping, and collection of rare or threatened species is prevented.***
Conclusion
FSC and CITES share a common goal to protect and enhance threatened and endangered species and to prevent their extinction. They do not always ban the commercial use of those species but allow their well-controlled trade – when it does not weaken their conservation status. Responsible trade generates economic value to the species, as well as income sources to local communities, which is an efficient incentive for long-term protection of the species at risk.
*https://www.fsc-uk.org/en-uk/about-fsc/what-is-fsc/fsc-principles
**https://www.iucnredlist.org/
***https://www.fsc-uk.org/preview.fsc-international-generic-indicators-fsc-std-60-004-v2-0.a-854.pdf