FSC-STD-BRA-01-2025: CHANGES AND UPDATES TO THE FSC FOREST PLANTATION STANDARD

Abstract

Known for promoting good forest management, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification system has been operating in the forestry sector since 1993 through forest management and chain of custody, guaranteeing the traceability and origin of products and raw materials. It works by complying with the principles, criteria and indicators of standards applied to the scope of the organization and assessed by an independent third party. In forest management, standards are divided into planted, natural and small producers and are updated from time to time to keep them in line with society's needs. In this sense, the management standards have been updated since 2015. The process of updating the standard for forest plantations was completed in September 2024 with the publication of the new version. As of its publication, all organizations that are certified or in the process of becoming certified will have to adapt and undergo audits based on the new indicators. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to carry out a comparative analysis of the FSC-STD-BRA-01 2014 V1-1 and FSC-STD-BRA-01-2025 standards. From this, it was concluded that principles 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9 have not undergone many changes, maintaining the themes previously covered in STD-2014. On the other hand, the criteria and indicators for principles 1, 2, 4, 6 and 10 were reorganized by distributing them to new principles and creating new criteria and indicators. In addition, an important point was the inclusion of specific indicators for SLIMF, along with the inclusion of the themes of conversion and remediation, FPIC, anti-corruption actions, indicators for gender equality and equity and the inclusion of indicators for non-timber products.