Making forest certification’s evidence accessible

Rob Shaw, PEFC Head of Standards and Integrity, describes forest management and chain-of-custody certification through national schemes, accreditation bodies and independent certification bodies. PEFC sets and owns the scheme but does not itself issue certificates. This distributed institutional architecture is crucial to the implementation problem. The account is from a scheme owner working toward pilots with CommonShare, not an independently assessed deployment.

The current flow relies on spreadsheets and manual transfers through certification bodies and national organisations. Information remains siloed, limiting trend analysis and the ability to answer demands for evidence. Physical chains are also complex: mixing, processing and international movement require more than a database of certificates. The speaker explains that some certified products contain uncertified material subject to due diligence. A certification logo therefore does not necessarily indicate 100% certified forest content.

Forest examples illustrate material transformations and origin tracking, including plantation pulp and barcode links between logs and stumps. Product-use and environmental claims are attributed illustrations, not lifecycle assessments or consumer recommendations. The proposed future combines modernised standards, ecosystem-service evidence, permissioned exchange and product passports. Several elements are ambitions over the next few years. Privacy, security and data sovereignty remain adoption conditions in a commercially secretive industry.

The Q&A reveals uneven capability: a small group of large certification bodies accounts for much activity, while a long tail lacks digital systems and serves local languages and markets. The proposed rollout starts with large bodies, adapting priorities for risk. This may offer practical scale but leaves an inclusion question about smaller or linguistically distinct providers. Pilot supply chains are to be selected through brands, manufacturers and their counterparties; willingness to cooperate is something to discover, not assume. The pilot seeks physical conversion and traceability data, not financial information. Strong research evidence is this rollout constraint and the existing manual data path, with future-product claims clearly labelled.