Courses for the Logging Companies: Disputes Resolved in Practice

The Silver Taiga Foundation specialists are completing the first in this season educational courses – for the employees of OJSC “Mondi Syktyvkar” and its contractors. The courses are devoted to the certification according to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) scheme, and above all, fulfillment of the environmental requirements of the Russian National Standard of FSC certification.

Two groups – 24 people, including Production and Technical Department engineers, forest foremen, logging plots allocators, cartographers – have already passed a three-day training. The program consists of one and a half days of theoretical classes held at the premises of the Finno-Ugric ethno-park in Yb, where the groups have been accommodated all these days, and the same amount of practical classes – directly on the logging plots harvested at different times.

The classroom training has not just reminded the students the content of the FSC National Standard. It was mainly focused on teaching them how to meet the requirements of this standard by improving the approaches, introducing GIS technologies, and using the Earth Remote Sensing methods (space images). These and other modern technologies and approaches allow getting up-to-date information about the territory and “see” the most important and vulnerable landscape areas in advance, in order to consider them during the planning process. By the way, many points of the FSC certification requirements involve fulfillment of the conditions, supplementing and exceeding the requirements of the current legislation. Nonfulfillment of these conditions, if such is detected during the audit, results in issue of Corrective Action Requests (CARs) to the company. If there are plenty of such CARs, the certificate validity can be suspended. Moreover, if the CARs are not fulfilled in time, the certificate can be withdrawn from the company, which leads not only to the image-related, but also economic losses of the company.

The field part of the courses has been held on the demonstration sites of the Syktyvdinsky and Priluzsky districts – near Yb and Kydzyavidz. The leaders of the courses – the Silver Taiga Director Yury Pautov and ecologists Nikolay Shuktomov and Alexander Borovlyov have shown through specific examples whether the key biotopes had been properly preserved on the logging sites, whether the landscape peculiarities had been taken into account, ect. The central task of the courses has been focused on resolving all disputed points in the standard requirements interpretation. In fact, arguable points, double interpretation of one and the same requirements are not uncommon, and it is easier to reach common grounds in the course of the discussion using practical examples. That’s exactly what the field part of the course has been devoted to.

On Monday the Foundation employees started off for Yb with another, third group of trainees.