In Search of a Unified Approach
On the 26-27th of January a workshop on the topic “Flora and fauna monitoring – methodological approaches for fulfillment of the Russian National FSC standard requirements” was organized by Silver Taiga Foundation.
In compliance with principles of voluntary forest certification according to FSC system sustainable forest management implies conduct of monitoring allowing to judge about composition and changes in the flora and fauna on the territory due to performed forest harvesting. Such monitoring is needed for timely revealing of significant negative changes in flora and fauna, caused by the business activities, and development of the measures for reducing this impact.
Requirements of the Russian national FSC standard on monitoring of flora and fauna are almost impossible to meet by the companies under certification. This was the reason of such workshop arraignment. Organization of the monitoring system in an enterprise may be conducted in a variety of ways and it depends on plenty of external circumstances. It’s extremely difficult to find competent specialists and consultants for organization and conduct of the monitoring for all indicators of the Standard, and auditors checking implementation of these indicators are almost always dissatisfied with the results and make the corrective action requests (CARs). As a result, standard developers, certifiable enterprises, consultants and auditors cannot find a way out of this “deadlock”, which will satisfy everybody.
Experience of organization and conduct of flora and fauna monitoring during FSC certification in Canada, USA, Sweden, Finland, and also at the certified enterprises in Arkhangelsk region, Komi Republic, Republic of Karelia and other regions of Russia was considered during the workshop.12 experts from four regions of the European part of Russia took part in the workshop. Among them there were representatives of non-governmental conservation organizations, scientific institutes, logging companies, certification authorities.
The discussion focused on the most accessible flora and fauna monitoring methods depending on the exploration degree of the territories, scale of the forestry and certification and, the most important, possibilities of using the monitoring results for improvement of the forest management on the certified territories.
It became apparent for all workshop participants, that now it’s impossible to develop common recommendations for various Russian conditions. It will take more than one meeting to agree upon the positions of the parties. The next workshop on the discussed problems was planned for April, 2011.