I like the definition of climate smart forestry which covers much of what I put in my table. I will point out that the authors did this specific to mountain forests in Europe so the specifics may not be right for North America. Your Yale study that you cited is also interesting. SFI certainly began in industry after many, including myself while I worked at Scott Paper, found FSC unworkable in the contest of Scott operations of our business and our forests. And we did evaluate FSE, I even began sending comments to FSC even before the meeting in Canada when it was just a little organization in Europe.
SFI left AF&PA many years ago and has grown and developed overtime just as FSC – that is what standards do and of course some of those changes meant working within the international PEFC system so that SFI has international accreditation. The article (not sure how old it is) used the SFI standards that existed 10 years ago, did it do the same for FSC? If so we should look at how forest certification has evolved because it is a rapid evolving arena.
The current SFI standard has changed a lot from the one in the article, here is a discussion of the changes. SFI is currently working on a new version of the standard which should have Board approval this spring so the new standard should be in place this year. I think you will find the changes are quite dramatic on the new standard. The Board is not dominated by industry and has not been since the SFB left AF&PA 20 years ago. And SFI Inc began in 2007. I will point out that when SFI was developed every member in AF&PA had to do it or they had to leave the association which was a very powerful change agent for how industrial forest operations were changed in one day by the AF&PA Board actions. Seventeen dues paying members were expelled for not complying with SFI. It really had an immediate and widespread effect across the USA.
To me it seems sort of like the effort that Architects are trying to accomplish with their 2030 challenge. Can you imagine if the AIA board voted to put a program in place that required every member of AIA to change immediately how they design buildings? Well that is what SFI under AF&PA did do. REALLY BIG DEAL!
I am a forester and I am an environmentalist. I probably care more about all of this than most of you. I train my students to operate in this manner and I will be the first to call out a bad actor. And yes there are bad actors still in this world. They get called out just like a recent operation in Russia was called out.
So I agree let’s get out the weeds and make some recommendations that make sense. But let’s not continue to argue about an acre of trees. Can we not agree that buying from certified sustainable managed forests is good and move on. The bigger issue in carbon is to not use products that are either fossil-based carbon products like concrete (limestone is the fossil carbon) or whose manufacturing process is heavily dominated by fossil-based energy. Some friends of mine won a noble prize for saying this more than 30 years ago and we still are not listening to them.