NGOs, research institutions, and other allies

We’ve used our experience as a convener and co-creator to develop Focus Forests, a multistakeholder dialogue tool that facilitates joint decision making on an important topic: protecting the future of high-conservation-value forests.  

These forests can include intact forest landscapes, ancient forests, Indigenous cultural landscapes, and other forests with unique social and environmental value.    

Developed jointly with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), our framework uses a newly developed dialogue methodology based on behavioral, economic, and game theory to explore different scenarios and facilitate shared decisions.   

We’ve piloted the framework in areas such as Gabon, where competing economic, environmental, and social interests have hindered agreement on intact forest landscapes.

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Sustainable intensification is one potential answer to a significant challenge: protecting forests and their invaluable benefits to the environment while simultaneously increasing production of the forest products that the world’s growing population depends on.

Intensification is only sustainable if it delivers shared value, where benefits are spread equally among businesses, communities, and ecosystems. FSC is exploring the shared value created by intensification within FSC-certified forests and its effects on the wider landscape.

Join us in our journey to develop new solutions for sustainable intensification. Subscribe to the FSC Sustainable Intensification Newsletter or contact your local FSC team. 

We’re working with NGOs around the world to champion forestry policies that will meet the needs of society while ensuring the long-term health and resilience of our forests. For example, we recently joined forces with the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), the largest network of environmental citizens’ organizations in Europe. The EEB unites more than 170 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and citizens’ groups from over 35 European countries to advocate for progressive policies aimed at creating a better environment in the European Union and beyond.   

We’re focusing our efforts on minimising the risk that products associated with deforestation are placed in the EU market, ensuring forest biodiversity protection, safeguarding forests of high environmental and social value, enhancing the conditions for forest resilience, and combatting illegal logging.

We use the High Conservation Value (HCV) approach—identifying, managing, and monitoring —in our certification standards (which influence FSC-certified forests or products) and more generally as a resource for conservation planning. FSC seeks to maintain, enhance, and promote the importance of these values. 

A key part of HCVs is ensuring that activity in forests does not have a negative impact on biodiversity—that is, the diversity within and between species and the ecosystem as a whole, including forests. For FSC, maintaining and implementing management of biodiversity and HCVs goes hand in hand.