News Forestry
FSC publishes controlled forest management evaluations standard

FSC has published the new version (V2-0) of FSC-STD-20-012 Controlled Forest Management Evaluations standard in English, French and Spanish. The standard is available in the document centre here.

FSC explains that this standard specifies the requirements for FSC accreditation for controlled forest management certification. The publication of FSC-STD-30-010 V3-0 Controlled Forest Management on 1 January 2024, necessitated the revision of its accreditation standard, FSC-STD-20-012. Therefore, the Controlled Forest Management Evaluations standard has been prepared using FSC-STD-20-007 V4-0 Forest Management Evaluations as its conceptual basis and it indicates how the requirements outlined in FSC-STD-20-007 V4-0 should be applied when evaluating management units for conformance with FSC-STD-30-010 V3-0 Controlled Forest Management.

The Controlled Forest Management (CFM) standard differs from the requirements in FSC’s Forest Management Evaluation standard with the following differences:

• Ecosystem services are limited to validation option only in CFM certification
• As CFM certification is limited to one cycle for certificate holders, certification bodies are responsible for rejecting management units that are or were certified against version 3-0 of FSC-STD-30-010 Controlled Forest Management
• Step-up evaluation requirement included in the requirements which refer to mandatory transition from CFM certification to certification against the full set of requirements of the locally adapted Forest Stewardship Standard (FSS)