Market Tools for Community and Family Forests
To add value to FSC certification, FSC has developed market tools for FSC certified forest operations as well as operations who need additional support before getting certified. These tools are being piloted locally to drive community and family forest certification on a global scale.
Community & Family Forests Program
Capturing market benefits of FSC certification: Market Tools
Getting certified is just the piece of supporting community and family forests; where profiting from and deriving benefits from this certification are key in securing long-term benefits from FSC certification. Considering that community and family forests typically operate in small-scale forestry operations, difficulties include not have commercially desirable species, not enough volume, lacking appropriate equipment and required business skills. To address these issues, FSC is embarking on bringing the following tools to community and family forests to support their efforts towards getting certified and connecting to the right buyers of their forest products:
Volume aggregator tool: Allows community and family forests to aggregate volumes and negotiate as a group with the buyer.
Economic viability tool: This tool runs different responsible management scenarios for community and family forests to analyze their products and then fit their products to the buyer. Considerations and scenarios that this tools employs includes their current practices, responsible management and requirements for certification.
Screening tool: Provides a quantitative way of showing probabilities of success of specific initiatives. These probabilities will then be considered in selecting priority and pilot projects for driving certification taking specific factors identified by the tool into consideration (i.e. transportation costs, taxes). Additionally, the tool reflects limiting factors which can then show where to invest resources and ask for funding support to further support community and family forests.