Assessment of Chain-of-Custody Certification in the Czech and Slovak Republic

Abstract

Forest certification is a voluntary verification tool that has been gaining importance within the global sustainability issues as an independent verification tool for sustainable forest management and wood processing industry and as an influencer in private and public purchasing policies and a component of emerging wood harvesting and trade legality schemes. This study focuses on the chain-of-custody (CoC) component of forest certification. A survey of CoC certified companies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia was carried out to explore the understanding of the concept and role of forest and CoC certification as an environmental, economic, and social tool. It aimed to determine expectations following from the implementation of CoC certification by companies and to identify difficulties in existing certified wood product supply chains and costs related to purchase and sales of certified forest products, respectively. Results indicate that respondents demonstrated a high level of understanding of the CoC concept and that they link forest certification mainly to the issues of legality, tracing the origin source of supply and promotion of sustainable utilisation of wood. The main expected benefits are linked to the improvement of an external company image followed by penetration of new markets and increase of sales volume. CoC is not considered a tool to improve internal company performance and efficiency. The key problems connected to certified supply chains relate to the sufficient quantity of certified forest products, low margins and overpriced certified material inputs. Respondents reported none or minimum price premiums for their certified products over non-certified alternatives. Several differences related to the understanding of the sustainable forest management concept and the level of price premium paid for certified inputs were identified between the PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) and FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified companies as well as between the different forest products sectors.

Understanding Sustainable Forest Management Certification in Slovakia: Forest Owners’ Perception of Expectations, Benefits and Problems

“…Similar problems connected with certification were mentioned by Giessen et al [77] and Paluš et al [34]. By examining the perceived level of problems related to certification issues, it was revealed that FSC-certified forest owners perceived almost all problems more seriously than PEFC certified ones who only consider the compliance with certification criteria by contractors as a more problematic issue.…”

“…Thus, the certified owners in particular understand certification as a tool for presenting their improved forest management practices and, consequently, developing their environmental performance [24,34,35,37,41,42,44,45]. On the other hand, neither the certified nor non-certified forest owners consider the economic role of certification to be an important one.…”

“…Many survey-based studies have evaluated the willingness to pay for certified wood products [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and indicated a level of price premium that consumers were willing to pay for different wood products in specific market segments. Apart from the promotion of sustainable forest management practices and the satisfaction of supporting the sustainability of natural forest resources and society as a whole [40], benefits following from the adoption of forest certification are related to the improvement of the external companies' image associated to their environmental performance [11,34,35,37,[41][42][43] and environmental communication and consumer relations [44][45][46][47].…”

“…Cashore and Stone [50] state that EUTR as a public policy may potentially have a positive effect on the acceptance of certification. Moreover, companies certified in the supply chain link forest certification mainly to the issues of legality, tracing, the origin source of supply and prevention from illegal logging [34,35].…”

“…In particular, although there have been some studies focusing on sustainable forest management certification [43,57,58], only a few concentrating on the attitudes of certified CoC companies towards forests and CoC certification [34,35,43] and a study aimed at the perception of certified forest products by end users [59].…”