About Forest Certification – For Practitioners
Three workshops on the topic “Introduction to the voluntary forest certification” have been conducted in January – February by the specialists of Silver Taiga Foundation for managers and engineers of the enterprises – certification groups’ members on the territory of Sysola and Kazhim forestry units, and also for the employees of the forestry units involved in the certification.
Such workshops were conducted due to the eagerness of the enterprises and forestry units’ employees to increase their knowledge in the sphere of forest certification. This is important both for practical fulfillment of ecological, economical and social requirements of certification, and for successful passing through the upcoming audit in March – April. The workshops were organized by Mondi Syktyvkar, the largest tenant on the territory of the Komi southern forestry units. A total of 38 people took part in the workshops.
Every workshop lasted for several days. On the first day participants of the workshop got familiar with history and development of voluntary forest certification, current forest certification systems. More detailed information was provided about certification according to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) system, because this system is the most in-demand in Russia. During the workshops participants worked with the Russian national FSC-standard, studied its principles and criteria. At the end of the first day listeners learned about the social requirements of voluntary forest certification.
The second day of the workshops was mainly devoted to ecological requirements of voluntary forest certification, because these very requirements are the most difficult to execute. The listeners learned how to build-up a protection system for rare and protected species at the enterprise rent base, how to conserve biodiversity when starting utilization of the logging sites, how to define high conservation value forests (HCVF) and select the proper forest exploitation mode for them, how to minimize negative impact on soil. Finally, participants of the workshops were tested and the results showed high learning degree of the studied materials.
At the beginning of March similar workshops will be conducted in Priluzje forestry unit.