New Chain of Custody Advice Notes published

FSC published Advice Notes for Chain of Custody Certification on Annual Administration Fee and Controlled Forest Management (CFM) claim.

The new Advice Notes related to Annual Administration Fee (AAF) calculation (ADVICE-40-004-25 & ADVICE-40-006-02) includes requirements for the organization to provide information to the certification body (CB) for Annual Administration Fee (AAF) calculation.

Advice Notes related to the CFM claim in the Chain of Custody Certification are ADVICE-40-004-27 & ADVICE-40-006-03. 

These Advice Notes are available in the relevant Directives FSC-DIR-40-004 and FSC-DIR-40-006

ADVICE-40-004-25 & ADVICE-40-006-02

The main objective for these advice notes is to provide normative references, linked to the Chain of Custody Standard (FSC-STD-40-004) and Project Certification Standard (FSC-STD-40-006) for the information needed for the calculation of the Annual Administration Fee (AAF). The AAF Policy (FSC-POL-20-005 V3-4) requires certification bodies to ‘collect, verify and enter into the FSC Certification Database the necessary information for calculating the AAF’ (clause 2.2), however the requirement for the organization (certificate holder) to provide this information was not explicitly provided. Therefore, these advice notes provide explicit requirements to facilitate the provision of this information to certification bodies.

The requirements have been written to align with the AAF Policy and the final published version takes into consideration the stakeholder feedback received during the two consultation phases. 

ADVICE-40-004-27 & ADVICE-40-006-03

FSC-STD-30-010 V3-0 Controlled Forest Management standard introduced a new output claim (FSC CFM) to incentivize controlled forest management, and to distinguish it from forest products sourced as controlled material or FSC Controlled Wood (CW) that conform to FSC-STD-40-005 Requirements for Sourcing FSC Controlled Wood.

This advice note provides instructions for establishing product groups in the chain of custody system with the FSC CFM claim for the purpose of controlling the corresponding output claim.

FSC would like to thank the working group and the colleagues for supporting this normative document process, and for all stakeholders who participated in the consultations.

For any comments or questions on the advice notes, or if you would like to request some form of information session for organizations (certificate holders) on these advice notes prior to their effective date, please contact chainofcustody@fsc.org

For information requests on the AAF Advice Note, please ensure the email title includes ‘Information Request on AAF Advice Note’.  Dependent on demand, we will contact requestees directly with an update.