The Forest Stewardship Council’s will vote on new traceability rules amid fraud allegations
This week the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) will vote on whether to build a global volume-tracking system—an effort to plug the holes through which, critics say, billions of dollars in fraudulent wood slip each year, reports Philip Jacobson.
The Bonn-based group’s tick-tree logo appears on everything from tables to tissue boxes, a promise that forests were managed responsibly. But insiders and watchdogs argue the certification often rests on faith.
“It’s a trust-based system,” says Sam Lawson of Earthsight. His group estimates that up to $30 billion of falsely labeled wood moves through FSC supply chains annually.
FSC rejects that as speculation, insisting its audits, wood-sample tests, and “transaction verifications” safeguard integrity. Yet even a senior official concedes fraud remains widespread. The system’s flaw is structural: companies report to outside auditors but not to any central database, leaving no way to reconcile what goes in with what comes out.
A proposal backed by WWF and U.K. retailer Kingfisher—known as Motion 30—would require companies to record trades in a unified ledger, possibly blockchain-based. Business members, wary of cost and bureaucracy, have blocked similar ideas before.
Supporters say this time the stakes are higher. Since Russia and Belarus were expelled from the scheme in 2022, certified forests have shrunk by nearly a third while the number of licensees has grown. The math, as one FSC insider put it, “doesn’t add up.”
See Jacobson’s piece at https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/fsc-to-vote-on-new-traceability-rules-amid-fraud-allegations/