Forest management reform and regional forestry promotion by means of FSC certification

Summary The situation of forest management in Japan has become worse recently. Some forest owners are interested in forest certification with the expectation of improving this hard situation. There are two types in forest certification systems. One is the Environment Management System of IS014000 Series, which is based on system development. The other is the FSC Certification, which is mainly based on performance standards. The authors thought the FSC Certification would be a more useful tool for forest management reform and regional forestry promotion because FSC is performance based and it also enables an appeal to the public's environmental-friendliness through its logo mark. The forest management body investigated here was SAN-EI KOGYO Co., Ltd., which owned and managed large areas of forest, mostly sugi plantations, in Kaneyama Town, Yamagata Prefecture. This company was thinking of establishing a new business enterprise that could fulfil accountability in the process of getting FSC resource manager certification, and could be entrusted with the forest management of small-scale owners' forests in the future. The requirements of forest management entrustment and those of FSC certification are found to be almost identical to each other. Through forest management entrusted to a FSC-certified resource manager, management scale will be expanded, and products will have added value. As a result, regional forestry and the forest products industries as a whole would possibly be promoted. The new Forest and Foresiry Basic Law revised in 2001 (13th year of Heisei) was also considered to be favorable to such forest management entrustment. Assuming that SAN-EI KOGYO Co., Ltd. will be assessed by a certifier, present forest management activities were reviewed. It was found that forest information handling should be more sophisticated and many kinds of documents should be newly developed, though field operations were mostly satisfactory. Such recommendations, from the viewpoint of certification assessment, will lead to forest management reform.