Is the greatest threat to FSC its own members?

For nearly three decades, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has stood as the gold standard of responsible forestry. Its little green logo has graced everything from garden furniture to paper products, offering reassurance to companies and consumers alike that the forests of the world were being managed sustainably.

But today, I fear that FSC’s greatest threat does not come from loggers, climate change or corporate greenwashers. It comes from within — from its own members.

I say this not as an outsider sniping at the system, but as someone who has been involved since the early days, as an auditor, a partner, and as the Executive Director of Preferred by Nature, an organisation that works closely with FSC and with thousands of certificate holders around the world. I want FSC to succeed. Yet I see how its internal politics and well-intentioned but ultimately self-defeating democracy are tying the system in knots.
 

Death by hundreds of motions

Every three years, FSC’s General Assembly gathers to debate and vote on “motions” — proposals from members on how the system should change. On paper, this sounds like grassroots democracy at its best. In practice, it has become a treadmill of complexity where members micromanage the organisation.

For several GAs there has been a motion calling for simplification of the ever-growing complex system. There is also one for the upcoming GA. However, one motion requesting simplification and 50 other motions that each make the system more complex. This has driven the complexity of the system the edge of breaking it. E.g. in the early days, the requirements for Chain of Custody were less than two pages. Today, there are hundreds!

The result?  A system so tangled in procedures and compliance requirements that it risks losing sight of the actual forests it was created to protect.

This is not simply a matter of efficiency. When rules multiply beyond reason, the space for common sense shrinks. Instead of focusing on outcomes — healthy forests, secure communities, reduced deforestation — the organisation becomes obsessed with the procedures and systems.
 

The integrity gap

This culture of endless tinkering has also distracted FSC from tackling its most urgent challenge: integrity.

More than a decade ago, FSC’s leadership rightly identified supply chain integrity as the top priority. The promise was simple: if a product carries the FSC label, you can trust it. But trust has been eroded. Investigations, including our own, have shown large scale use of FSC logos on products that never should have qualified.

The chain of custody — the mechanism meant to track certified material from forest to shelf — has too often failed. According to Phil Guillery, FSC’s former Director of System Integrity,  20-30% of CoC claims may be false. Think about that for a moment: nearly a third of the supposedly certified supply chain could be misrepresenting its claims. That figure alone should terrify anyone who cares about the credibility of the FSC logo.

At the heart of the problem lies something very basic: there is no proper reconciliation between what one company sells as “FSC certified” and what the next company buys. Everything is based on paper claims. If a supplier says they sold 1 ton of certified timber, there is no system to confirm that the buyer received the same 1 ton — and not 100 on paper. This lack of volume matching leaves the door wide open for fraud.

There was a solution on the table years ago: the Online Claims Platform, a system designed to trace material flows across supply chains. It worked technically. But pushback from members who feared costs or transparency killed it. Instead of building on that foundation, FSC is now starting over, once again debating standards and pilots while the integrity gap widens.

If companies and consumers cannot trust the label, everything else is irrelevant.
 

Stagnation while the world moves on

Meanwhile, FSC is stagnating. Certification of forest management has not grown significantly in years. Chain of custody certifications are still increasing, but much of that growth comes from China, where integrity concerns are most acute. The FSC conversion rules have made FSC a “non-applicable” scheme in several parts of the world. 

When I started working with certification, the big brands committed to FSC as their future goal. Today, FSC has become more of a minimum bar. These same brands have set sustainability targets that go far beyond what FSC currently offers and are now building their own systems on top of FSC to meet those higher expectations.

At the same time, we are facing climate change at a speed our planet has not seen for millions of years. The forests we see today will not be the forests suited for tomorrow’s climate. The same goes for nature — today’s species will not all survive in the future conditions. Yet FSC’s main focus remains on protecting existing ecosystems and promoting local species. This approach risks becoming a disaster. FSC must instead guide and promote accelerated adaptation, helping forests evolve into ecosystems that can survive the future, not just preserve the past.

This should set alarm bells ringing. If FSC continues to behave like an organisation asleep, adjusting its existing structures rather than reimagining them for the challenges of today and tomorrow. By failing to adapt, FSC risks turning its vision of ‘Forests For All Forever’ into nothing more than a museum label.
 

A call to members

None of this will happen if members keep overwhelming the organisation with well-meaning but narrow motions. The impulse to fix every perceived gap by adding a new rule is understandable. But it is killing the system.

Members must learn to prioritise. To say no to complexity, say yes to integrity and yes to adaptation for the future. To put the credibility and future of FSC above the comfort of process.

Otherwise, FSC risks becoming what I sometimes call a museum forest certification scheme: preserving procedures rather than protecting forests. And if that happens, businesses and consumers will look elsewhere.
 

Why this matters

The stakes are enormous. Forests are our frontline defence against climate change and biodiversity collapse. FSC remains the best-known global system for ensuring those forests are managed responsibly. If it fails, we do not simply lose a logo. We lose one of the few mechanisms to connect consumer markets with sustainable forest management.

As someone who has spent his career working with FSC, I believe it can still succeed. But it will require humility, focus and, above all, restraint from its own members. Democracy is a strength only if it serves the mission. If not, it becomes the greatest threat.