Largest Forest to Date in N. America is FSC- Certified

Northern Ontario in Canada is home to the first FSC- certification in the Canadian Boreal Forest. The SmartWood program of the Rainforest Alliance and World Wildlife Fund-Canada announced that the Gordon Cosens Forest has been granted Forest Management certification under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) system. Managed by Tembec, and located in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada, this is the largest forest in Canada to attain the highly regarded FSC/SmartWood seal of approval. The Gordon Cosens Forest covers over 2 million hectares (5 million acres) and is the largest FSC forest certification to date in North America. 75,000 hectares of the forest is owned by Tembec; the remainder is crown land, with management supervised by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. In 2001, Tembec committed to certify all its forests by 2005, an area nearly twice the size of New Brunswick – 35 million acres. The exhaustive certification process included in depth field-oriented dialogues with First Nations, ENGOs, forest industry and other stakeholders in Ontario and throughout Canada. Richard Z. Donovan, Rainforest Alliance’s Chief of Forestry, currently in charge of SmartWood’s work in Canada, said that boreal forest management and certification is “extremely complex due to First Nation issues, as well as […]

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