PEFC Group Certification Dialogue Webinar Series: Knowledge sharing amongst members and industry stakeholders

14 July 2022 News

Smallholders, local communities, and indigenous peoples own or manage nearly half of the world’s forests and the way those forests are managed can have an influence on the climate, biodiversity, and health of our planet.

It is therefore vital that smallholders can gain certification, not only to benefit from the advantages it brings to their livelihoods, but to ensure that these forests are responsibly managed so they are around for generations to come.

To achieve this, we must make sustainable forest management certification accessible to these smallholders. This is where PEFC group certification comes in, enabling smallholders to group together and organize themselves, pool their resources and work as a team to achieve certification. 

Since 2010, our Smallholder Group Certification programme has enabled the sharing of experiences and facilitated cooperation amongst family forest owners, community forest groups, and indigenous peoples in implementing sustainable forest management and pursuing forest certification.

Within this programme, our group certification field dialogue provides practical and actionable advice on realistic pathways towards group certification for smallholders. The field dialogue has taken place three times, in Spain, Finland, and Germany. 

This year, as a part of our collaboration with the UN-REDD Initiative: Sustainable Forest Trade in the Lower Mekong Region, we continue our commitment to share knowledge and experience amongst PEFC members and industry stakeholders with a series of informative webinars.

Webinar 1: Smallholder Group Forest Management Certification: PEFC Standard and Tools 

The first webinar will provide a global perspective of PEFC group certification and an overview of PEFC’s unique, inclusive approach to group certification. Our technical staff will walk through the PEFC group forest management requirements, ST 1002:2018, and briefly explain how to fulfil those requirements in practice. We will also clarify how smallholders can prepare for group certification using case studies from smallholder certification successes in Laos. 

The webinar takes place 10:00 CEST on 27 July. Register for free now.

Webinar 2: Scaling up group certification through shared experiences and collaboration amongst the PEFC alliance/partners

In the second webinar, we will hear from representatives of the Thailand Forest Certification Council (TFCC) and industry partners Agrodominant, who will share their experiences of working with rubber smallholders to gain sustainable forest management certification through the group certification programme. 

More broadly, PEFC Spain will provide insights into their own successes in working with regional governments to expand and deliver certification to smallholders, and their new collaboration with the Rubber Authority of Thailand (ROAT). 

The webinar takes place 10:00 CEST on 3 August. Register for free now.

Webinar 3: What are the pathways towards group certification for smallholders in Vietnam?

For the final webinar in our series, we will turn our focus towards central Vietnam, and the lessons learned from the certification of a group of Acacia forest owners, who have generated extra revenue streams whilst reducing pressure on forests. We will also provide a discussion on the potential pathways of group certification for smallholders in Vietnam, examining the role of government and private sector bodies in facilitating the transition towards group certification.

The webinar takes place 10:00 CEST on 10 August. Register for free now.