Smallholders, local communities, and indigenous peoples own or manage nearly half of the world’s forests and the way those forests are managed can have an influence on the climate, biodiversity, and health of our planet. Source: Timberbiz
It is therefore vital that smallholders can gain certification, not only to benefit from the advantages it brings to their livelihoods, but to ensure that these forests are responsibly managed, so they are around for generations to come.
To achieve this, we must make sustainable forest management certification accessible to these smallholders. This is where PEFC group certification comes in, enabling smallholders to group together and organize themselves, pool their resources and work as a team to achieve certification.
Since 2010, the Smallholder Group Certification program has enabled the sharing of experiences and facilitated cooperation among family forest owners, community forest groups, and indigenous peoples in implementing sustainable forest management and pursuing forest certification.
Within this program, the group certification field dialogue provides practical and actionable advice on realistic pathways towards group certification for smallholders. The field dialogue has taken place three times, in Spain, Finland and Germany.
This year, as a part of the collaboration with the UN-REDD Initiative: Sustainable Forest Trade in the Lower Mekong Region, PEFC will continue its commitment to share knowledge and experience amongst PEFC members and industry stakeholders with a series of informative webinars.
Webinar 1: Smallholder Group Forest Management Certification: PEFC Standard and Tools
The first webinar will provide a global perspective of PEFC group certification and an overview of PEFC’s unique, inclusive approach to group certification. PEFC technical staff will walk through the PEFC group forest management requirements, ST 1002:2018, and briefly explain how to fulfil those requirements in practice. It will also clarify how smallholders can prepare for group certification using case studies from smallholder certification successes in Laos.
The webinar takes place 10:00 CEST on 27 July.
Webinar 2: Scaling up group certification through collaboration amongst the PEFC alliance
In the second webinar, you will hear from representatives of the Thailand Forest Certification Council (TFCC) and industry partners Agrodominant, who will share their experiences of working with rubber smallholders to gain sustainable forest management certification through the group certification program.
More broadly, PEFC Spain will provide insights into its successes in working with regional governments to expand and deliver certification to smallholders, and their new collaboration with the Rubber Authority of Thailand (ROAT).
The webinar takes place 10:00 CEST on 3 August.
Webinar 3: What are the pathways towards group certification for smallholders in Vietnam?
For the final webinar in this series, the focus is towards central Vietnam, and the lessons learned from the certification of a group of Acacia forest owners, who have generated extra revenue streams whilst reducing pressure on forests. There will be a discussion on the potential pathways of group certification for smallholders in Vietnam, examining the role of government and private sector bodies in facilitating the transition towards group certification. This webinar is at 10.00 CEST on 10 August.
Registration is free visit www.pefc.org for more information.
