What Are Ecological CARs and How to Deal with Them

On September 16 – 18, the field educational courses on the implementation of the requirements of the Russian National standard of FSC certification for Mondi Syktyvkar employees were conducted.

OJSC “Mondi Syktyvkar” is the largest FSC-certified company in the Komi Republic and one of the largest in Russia. As an FSC certificate holder, the company should comply with the requirements of the National certification standard, which includes the fulfillment of many additional conditions of the social and ecological plan quite often exceeding the requirements of the current legislation. Nonfulfillment of these conditions detected during the certification audit results in an issue of Corrective Action Requests (shortly, CARs) to the company. If there are plenty of such CARs, the certificate validity can be suspended until they are fulfilled, and if the CARs are not fulfilled, the certificate can be withdrawn from the company, which already leads to significant economic and image-related negative consequences.

Mondi Syktyvkar uses various certification schemes, including a group one, when several independent companies – wood suppliers form one certified group, and Mondi, as a group leader, is responsible for the certification preparation and carrying out on the entire leased territory. If the group members have any problems, the CARs are addressed to the whole group.

Mondi Syktyvkar regularly conducts internal audits on compliance with the certification requirements in its logging companies and member companies of the certified group. Nevertheless, almost every time during an annual audit conducted by the independent certification bodies some CARs are issued. Notably, most often they are related to the ecological certification aspects.

Ecological CARs are related to the compliance with such ecological requirements as conservation of the forest ecosystems biodiversity, for example, competent keeping of the key biotopes during the planning and execution of the logging, conservation of the water- and soil protective forest functions, consideration of the landscape boundaries during the planning and organization of the forest use. These are the planning of the logging in space and time and the accounting of the landscape peculiarities of the area that the fulfillment of these requirements during the felling depends on. For this reason, Mondi Syktyvkar approached the Silver Taiga Foundation, which had been implementing the project “Ecosystem and landscape background for forestry and FSC planning” for several years, to carry out the educational field seminars for the employees of their logging companies, contractors supplying wood to Mondi Syktyvkar, and the companies allocating the wood lots, which are logged afterwards, in other words, the people directly influencing the proper planning of the logging on site with the account of the certification requirements.

The main peculiarity of these seminars is their “field” part, when the seminar facilitators – the Foundation Director Y.A. Pautov and ecologist N.V. Shuktomov – show on specific logged areas how to keep the key biotopes on the felling sites properly, how to consider the landscape boundaries – streams flood plains, hollows, and steep slopes – normally “invisible” on the forest maps and map-boards, and the most frequent mistakes made during the planning, allocation, and logging of the particular forest plots. During the seminar, considerable attention was also given to the use of the Earth Remote Sensing materials, simply said, space images of different scale and accuracy during the planning of the forest use and when accounting the ecological certification requirements.

In total, Mondi Syktyvkar and Silver Taiga Foundation have planned to conduct three such courses this year – the next ones are scheduled for the I and II decades of October.