Certified Insight #2: Certification, new pressures and the need for complementary assurance systems

Over the past three decades, forest certification has played a fundamental role in shaping what we collectively understand as sustainable forest management. As someone who helped build the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) and now chairs the UK Woodland Assurance Standard (UKWAS), I have long believed in certification’s value and I still do. However global market expectations, regulatory pressures and technological capabilities have changed profoundly since the 1990s. To maintain wood’s position as a trusted, climate-smart material, we now need complementary systems of assurance alongside certification.

When the 1992 UN Earth Summit failed to produce a legally binding global forest agreement, it created a vacuum. Into that space stepped voluntary certification initiatives aimed at demonstrating sustainable forest management. In the early years, mistrust between the forestry sector and civil society meant certification systems were designed heavily around governance processes and individual commitments. It often seemed more important that every landowner sign up to a standard than to demonstrate, at scale, that forests in a certain area were being managed responsibly.

This created real challenges in regions with highly fragmented ownership. In Bavaria, for example, roughly 700,000 individual forest owners hold around 3.6 million acres of forest. That is half of the total forest area of Bavaria. Expecting each owner to have their forest individually certified was simply impractical. This is why PEFC pioneered the jurisdictional approach. That is certifying the entire forest area, with collective responsibility for management being borne by all owners in the state. It was a pragmatic solution that met resistance at the time, but ultimately laid the groundwork for more scalable models of assurance.

Thirty years on, certification has created islands of verified sustainable forest management within a much larger global forest estate. Its achievements are real and enduring. But certification still covers only around one-tenth of global forest area, far short of what markets now expect in terms of legality assurance, deforestation-free origin and demonstrable provenance.

This limitation is especially evident in the United States, where the hardwood resource is owned by an estimated 9–10 million family forest owners. Most will harvest only once in their lifetime. For many, timber production ranks far below recreation, wildlife or family legacy as motivations for ownership.

And yet hardwood products from these forests must continue to access markets that increasingly require verifiable assurance on issues such as legality, deforestation-free status and responsible stewardship. The sector therefore needs tools that can operate credibly at scale, even where landowner participation is limited.

Fortunately, we now have technologies undreamt of in the early certification era such as high-resolution satellite monitoring, spatial risk assessments, plant-chemistry fingerprinting, geolocation-based provenance verification and blockchain-enabled traceability. These developments allow us to complement certification with broader jurisdiction-based systems that deliver the types of assurances regulators and buyers now expect.

Certification remains indispensable and I will always argue that. However, to enhance and protect the reputation of wood as a climate-smart, low-carbon material, we must also embrace additional, cost-effective, verifiable data-driven assurance systems that work at landscape scale.

That is the context in which AHA has emerged and why systems like it matter for the future of U.S. hardwoods.