The Programme for the Endorsement of Forestry Certification Schemes (PEFC) says it has not been consulted sufficiently on the World Bank‘s plans to assess forestry certification schemes.
The Bank, together with the WWF in their “Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use”, has devised a “questionnaire for the assessment of the comprehensiveness of certification schemes (QACC)”. The plan is that this will eventually be used by the Bank to evaluate whether it can back forestry programmes as part of its initiative with the WWF to “help to bring 200 million ha of production forests under independent certified management”.
The QACC is now being “field tested” by being sent out to forestry projects in 12 western and eastern European certified under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and PEFC schemes. The World Bank/WWF alliance will use the results to “evaluate the questionnaire itself and propose revisions and improvements accordingly” so that it becomes a “transparent mechanism for helping to assess which activities supported by WWF and the World Bank can be counted as contributions toward the Alliance’s certification target”.
However, PEFC secretary-general Ben Gunneberg has said that his organisation felt it had not been given enough opportunity to give its opinion on the excercise. It also did not know that the WWF was going to send out a press release on the launch of the questionnaire field test.
“We are still waiting for responses on queries we’ve put to the WWF and World Bank on the QACC , and yet we’ve seen documents in which they say the PEFC is ‘participating’ in the exercise,” he said.
He added that the QACC would be discussed at a PEFC meeting last Friday and that it would give further reaction afterwards.
