Group certification of private forest owners in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania

The project focused on achieving FSC certification among private forest owners in Baltic by promoting the group certification scheme. The overall aim of the project is to achieve group certification of private forest owners on a broad scale in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. NEPCon participated as a partner organization in the project carried out in cooperation with IKEA and WWF.

One important obstacle for the achievement of certification for small and medium size forest estates is that the existing certification procedures are too expensive for the individual forest owner, hence a group certification scheme would enable more private forests to become certified.

The project focused on three main goals:

1) To increase the amount of certified private forests in regions that are of priority for WWF and IKEA

2) To develop practical training and guidance material on responsible forest management and group certification.

3) To develop and expand group certification schemes in cooperation with group managers and buyers of wood products.

In the framework of this project, NEPCon elaborated a group certification toolkit, which can be used by forest owners to prepare for certification and establish group schemes. NEPCon also acted as an FSC certification service provider for a group of private forest owners  certified in the course of the project.