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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

The conflict of interest in forest certification

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In a recent letter to the editor, Kathy Abuso, president of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, painted a rosy picture of their certification of Minnesota DNR’s state forest lands, implying that certification assures an appropriate balance between the “three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social.” This balance is verified, she assures, by “independent, third-party auditors.”

There’s just one problem: The auditors aren’t truly independent. That’s because the auditors hired to assure compliance with the certification standards are actually paid by the DNR. In other words, if the auditors don’t certify state lands as being sustainably managed, there goes their future paycheck. This built-in conflict of interest in the forest certification model may not come into play with smaller landowners whose contracts make up a small proportion of an auditing company’s annual revenue. But the DNR is the largest certified public land holder in the US, and ranks as one of top ten certificate holders in the world under the second certification system DNR uses, the Forest Stewardship Council. This means the five-year contract DNR just issued to their auditor is worth nearly a quarter-million dollars, likely a significant part of the auditing company’s income.

To be fair, I participated in a previous audit when I worked for the DNR and found the auditors top notch, and they used their audit findings to nudge the DNR closer to meeting the environmental part of the certification standard. But because the DNR is one of the bigger players in the field, they’ve not been shy about pushing back when the auditor’s findings are not politically or economically expedient. And that’s happened all too often in recent years. The DNR’s abandonment of a policy to allow a small proportion of forests to grow old before harvest is a good example. That policy was intended to provide habitat for the myriad species found in older forests, key components of an ecologically-sustainable forest by any measure, but was sacrificed at the altar of maximizing economic return. Add to that DNR’s decision to harvest red pine forests at 60 to 70 years old, when they are far from ecologically mature, also under the debatable proposition of maximizing economic return since the large pine market is an important part of our regional economy, and the third pillar of sustainability, environmental, appears on the verge of crumbling.

How will auditors respond? We won’t have to wait long to find out, because the DNR’s five-year recertification audit will be conducted this fall. Hopefully the auditors will call out the DNR on their environmental backsliding, and require them to move towards a more balanced approach. If not, forest certification auditors will be following in the ill-fated footsteps of bond-rating agencies, like Standard and Poors, who—paid by the bond issuers—assigned high credit scores to inherently risky mortgage-backed securities, bringing down the economy and severely damaging their own reputations in the process. A similar failure on the part of forest auditors would spell bad news for our forests and irreparably damage the current forest certification model.

That would be unfortunate, because forest certification, now used worldwide, has the potential to move forest landowners towards more ecologically-sustainable management. That can only happen, though, if forest certification auditors refuse to approve less than certifiable practices like those adopted by the DNR.

Steve Wilson

Tower, Minn.