“Without traceability, FSC risks becoming irrelevant”: Earthsight’s Tara Ganesh on the future of forest certification

When Tara Ganesh arrives in Panama in a couple of weeks for the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC) General Assembly, she does so with a mixture of scepticism and hope. As Earthsight’s lead on Timber and Sanctions, Ganesh has spent years documenting how supposedly sustainable timber is often anything but. Yet despite her critiques, she insists she has not given up on FSC.

“Of course there’s hope for FSC,” she says. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be going, or spending years investigating supply chains and coordinating letters appealing for change. Many people inside FSC are progressive and genuinely trying to balance commercial use and protection despite the odds.”

Hope, however, comes with frustration. “The continued lack of verifiable traceability is a fundamental weakness,” she says.

“These aren’t one-off scandals”

Ganesh’s disillusionment stems from years of on-the-ground investigations. In Ukraine, Earthsight documented widespread corruption and illegal logging across a sector that was almost entirely certified. “The volumes of high-risk non-tropical wood from Ukraine to the EU exceeded tropical totals,” she says. “Circumstances have changed with the war, and we’re not calling for a ban on Ukrainian wood. But that experience showed us how deep the problems can run.”

Her team then turned to big brands, uncovering irregularities across Russia and Belarus. “We didn’t see FSC making the necessary changes, so we kept going,” she explains.

“Our undercover work found wood launderers in third countries freely offering FSC certificates for Russian birch plywood—even after FSC’s exit. Sometimes these were very large players. These aren’t one-off scandals. They’re symptoms of systemic weaknesses.”

Five urgent reforms

Ahead of the last General Assembly, Earthsight and other NGOs set out five urgent reforms. At the top of the list was compulsory, verifiable traceability from source to shelf — without it, Ganesh argues, certification “undermines its own idea.” She also calls for a stricter, more precautionary approach to violations, with companies suspended as soon as credible evidence emerges rather than months later. 

Transparency is another priority: maps of certified forests, harvest data and audit summaries should all be made public. A fourth demand is to tackle conflicts of interest in auditing, with trials of alternatives to the current client-pays system. Finally, she urges a cultural shift in what, where and how much is certified: “Timber is renewable, but not all forests are replaceable. Certification must be more cautious about which environments it will operate in, and act faster when systemic violations occur.”

Governance and bureaucracy

If the technical weaknesses weren’t enough, Ganesh points to FSC’s governance system as a brake on reform. “The voting system makes decisions extremely complicated. We saw last time how efforts to improve integrity ran into chamber politics. We want a conversation about governance being more agile, because the bureaucracy puts people off engaging, and that hurts progress.”

Working with other NGOs at the last GA, she has tried to lay out a basic blueprint for reform. “I don’t have all the answers,” she admits. “But we can see that FSC is at a crossroads. Right now the system is too slow, too complicated, and too bureaucratic to respond to urgent integrity problems.”

Signs of progress

Ganesh acknowledges that not all is bleak. “ASI hiring investigators with policing or journalism backgrounds is promising, and we’re hopeful. I was also glad to see  FSC making changes that will require it to publicly declare which firms report no FSC-certified sales in a year. It’s a no-brainer step to prevent misusing the logo when no certified material is handled. Ideally this applies globally, but robust traceability is essential to  making any of this work.”

She adds that FSC has issued guidance on stronger stakeholder analysis, which could give local groups more of a say in audits. “Affected people must have a meaningful seat at the table,” she says. “That’s encouraging.”

The bigger picture

According to Ganesh, making declarations about actual certified sales is a start. But the bigger prize is end-to-end, verifiable traceability—initially for high-risk supply chains, then across the board—and a precautionary suspension policy when credible evidence surfaces.

What would failure look like? Ganesh is clear. “It will keep happening. The scandals, the laundering, the erosion of trust. The greenwashing of harms caused to forests, people and climate. Without verifiable traceability and a more precautionary approach, FSC risks becoming irrelevant.”

And success? For her, it hinges on one decisive step. “The traceability motion being back on the table gives me hope. With the EU’s deforestation regulation coming in, and companies already investing in traceability, this is the moment. It needs to pass in strongest form and be implemented quickly. Why wait until 2030?”