It’s been a very long time since we’ve given you an update on our work on small woods. That certainly doesn’t reflect a lack of interest on our part; on the contrary, improving access to certification for small and community woods remains very much at the front of our minds. It’s high time we filled you in on the direction our thoughts have been taking.
Some of you will remember that, way back in 2018, we started a small woods project to investigate whether a radically streamlined Forest Stewardship Standard would help. It was not clear whether the standard was really the main barrier for small and community woods, bearing in mind that our existing standard, familiar to most forest managers as the UK Woodland Assurance Standard, or UKWAS, is very well established and widely understood. But the standard was something we could control directly, whereas other factors – like the direct costs of being audited, or the tangible benefits arising from certification – were not under our direct control.
We are very grateful to a group of brilliant individuals – representing the Community Woodlands Association, Llais y Goedwig, Coed Cymru, the Small Woods Association, the RSPB and the Woodland Trust – who came together to work on a standard. Discussions didn’t take quite the direction we expected (as is often the way in standard development!), and in the end the group came up with a draft based on UKWAS but with some requirements removed and some simplified, and all adapted to make the language more accessible. Rather than proceed with this as a standalone standard, with multiple drafts and public consultations, the group agreed to share it with the working group tasked with reviewing and, if necessary, revising UKWAS, so they could consider the potential for different requirements for small and community woods. As it happened, a few individuals took part in both groups. In the event, though, the UKWAS working group decided to stick with a size neutral approach.
In 2021 we received some funding from FSC International for a project we dubbed Tall Oaks from Little Acorns, or TOLA, a nod to lines from a poem by David Everett:
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
This funding allowed us to engage much more proactively with partner organisations, allowing us to connect (online, of course, in the Covid era) with small woodland owners and community woodland groups, to raise awareness and understanding of FSC certification and to judge needs, interest and concerns.
After a year of talking with individuals and organisations, we reached the conclusion that simpler standards were not the solution to bringing small and community woods into certification. For many potential certificate holders, their own personal assurance or their credibility within the wider forest sector depend on meeting the same standard as everyone else. The only benefit of a simpler standard is that it might be quicker, and therefore cheaper, to audit, but to cut costs in this way would mean sacrificing the robustness and credibility which attracted small and community woodland managers to certification in the first place.
Standards remain crucial. They should not present unnecessary or unreasonable barriers to small and community woods. We would like to think that FSC UK’s engagement with member organisations representing small and community woods is part of the reason they have taken part in the recent UKWAS revision, which can only be a good thing in making sure that the standard is relevant to the widest possible range of potential users. But it is clear that if we want to make a significant change to the uptake of certification, we will have to look for other solutions.
The real issue seems to be cost. For those not expecting to make money through sales of FSC-certified products or through external funding for FSC-verified ecosystem services claims, even if they are willing to absorb the costs of complying with UKWAS they still need to cover the direct costs of third-party auditing. FSC already makes concessions to small or low intensity managed forests (or SLIMFs) when it comes to auditing. But if woodland managers are seeking personal assurance or sector credibility, they might not want to be subject to less intensive auditing. So is there a way we can keep the same Forest Stewardship Standard and the same auditing procedures, but still reduce the direct costs of certification?
Well, maybe. Based on what we learned through the TOLA project, the FSC UK Board has been giving a lot of thought to whether we as an organisation can provide direct financial support to new or existing group schemes to help them cover the costs of certifying small and community woods. At first we thought there might be issues of conflict of interest, but now we’re reasonably confident that with a suitably transparent process we can avoid them. We trust we won’t be skewing any existing markets for professional forestry services if we are deliberately seeking to support those who are not currently able to achieve certification, especially if options for funding are open to anyone who wants to bid for them. There are still a lot of details to consider, and we might run a pilot project to test the principle in a low risk setting. We also need to think about how any seed funding from FSC UK can ultimately lead to financially viable groups of certified small and community woods. This is definitely an area we will continue to explore.
Not that certification has to be the only mechanism for achieving our mission of promoting responsible forest management. We’re also discussing with a partner organisation how we can fund an advisory service for owners of small woods to help them to improve their management in line with UKWAS, even if they never take the leap into certification.
So although we have been quiet for a while, and although some of the seeds we have sown have grown in slightly unexpected directions, still those little acorns have given rise to healthy seedlings, questing for the light…