Adaptive risk management for certifiably sustainable forestry

Abstract

The past decade has seen a global surge in forest management certification, with over 200 million hectares of the world's forest now certified as sustainably harvested. Because forests are some of the most species-rich environments on earth and more than 90% of the world's forests occur outside formal protected area systems, forest management certification will be one of the pervasive influences on global biodiversity for the foreseeable future. We find that current forest certification schemes are largely deficient because they fail to demand: (i) measurable management objectives for biodiversity, (ii) formal risk assessment of competing management options that integrate impacts on biodiver..