These changes will affect all FSC certificate holders and so please take the opportunity to consider these changes and their impacts and to feedback through the FSC consultation platform.
The general certification body requirements are currently amended to ensure conformity with the ISO standard 17065 for bodies certifying products, processes and services. These amendments have resulted in alignment needs of the forest management and chain of custody specific requirements for certification bodies. As a result, FSC has developed amended draft standards for FSC-STD-20-007 and FSC-STD-20-011 currently for consultation.
The revision is needed to align with the Regulation (EC) 765/2008 on Requirements for Accreditation and Market Surveillance at the European Economic Area (EEA) and at the United Kingdom (UK) level and FSC needs to adapt its requirements in order to operate within EEA and UK.
Key changes
The following is an overview of the key changes:
Chain of custody certification body requirements
- New Annex 2: List of documentation and records in chain of custody (CoC) audit processes
- New Annex 3: List of locations and sites for evaluation in CoC audits
- New Annex 4: Determination of audit time
- In addition to the changes above the introduction sections including the definitions were amended and some changes to the structure of the requirements were made.
Forest management certification body requirements
- Forest management specific parts were moved from FSC-STD-20-001 General Requirements for FSC Accredited Certification Bodies to FSC-STD-20-007
- Amended Annex 2: List of documentation and records in forest management
- Amended Annex 3: List of locations and sites for forest management evaluations
- New Annex 6: Determination of audit time
- New Annex 7: Specific requirements for controlled forest management were included in FSC-STD-20-007, thereby replacing the separate FSC-STD-20-012 standard.
- In addition to the changes above the introduction sections including the definitions were amended and some changes to the structure of the requirements were made.
Webinars
FSC will be conducting webinars to present the draft documents and to discuss the key changes. The webinars will cover the proposed changes to the general certification body standards as well as the proposed changes to the specific forest management and chain of custody requirements. Please register below for the webinars for technical users, such as our certification bodies.
Consultation webinar on FSC accreditation standards revision for technical users (session repeated):
- Thursday, 07 November 2024 at 8:00 – 09:30 GMT. Register here.
- Thursday, 07 November 2024 at 15:00 – 16:30 GMT. Register here.
Participate today
These changes will affect all FSC certificate holders and so please take the opportunity to consider these changes and their impacts and to feedback through the FSC consultation platform. The consultation is open until 21 November 2024. We are looking forward to your participation!