1-7 represented. The process was completed and finalized during 1996 with acceptance of the standard by the Standards Council of Canada. The standard was published in October 1996. An international initiative having potential to be of significance to larger Canadian forest land owners in particular, is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The Council, a non-government, independent, volunteer organization with headquarters in Mexico, is comprised of participants from numerous countries. It has been in existence since 1993 and has developed its own set of principles and criteria for the evaluation of forest land management practice. The FSC does not, itself, conduct evaluation audits, but has established itself as an accreditor of certification organizations. It has developed formalized procedures for accreditation and guidelines for certifiers which are designed to bring structure and standardization to the certification undertakings of accredited organizations. The purpose of the FSC's accreditation procedure is to permit a guarantee of authenticity of the claims of forest products producers and manufacturers that their products are derived from sustainably managed forests. The FSC has developed a set of 10 principles of forest management and their attendant criteria. They are international in scope and do not contain nation-specific elements. As a result, they cannot deal with the specific or unique aspects of national, or even regional, environmental, social and economic conditions. As a further result, the FSC has stated quite definitively that their principles and criteria are meant to be supplemented by local sustainable forestry REGISTRATION refers to the"procedure by standards. Terminologically, the FSC principles and criteria equate, roughly, to the criteria and indicators of the Canadian Approach. They include many of the environmental, social and economic elements of the Canadian Approach but go somewhat further in that they incorporate also some elements of the CSA SFM Standard, namely management planning and monitoring and assessment. In Canada's case, the FSC is more of a parallel initiative than a complementary one. Its main advantage, at this time, is that it is an operating process which provides an opportunity for producers and manufacturers to gain some claim to authenticity while the more specific programs of countries such as Canada and, ultimately, the ISO, are developed and put in place. As with the CSA process, an FSC supported certification is voluntary and resource owner initiated and funded.
which a registration organization indicates relevant characteristics and particulars of a registrant's Sustainable Forest Management System in an appropriate and publicly available list following a successful registration audit". CERTIFICATION refers to the "certificate of registration" or the "official document issued by a registration organization to the registration applicant upon successful completion of a registration audit".
REGISTRATION AUDIT refers to "a systematic and documented verification process to objectively obtain and evaluate evidence to determine whether the performance of a Sustainable Forest Management System and the defined forest area under that system conforms to the registration audit criteria....".
The FSC has looked askance at the CSA process because it was promoted by Canadian industry and is being developed by an agency (the Canadian Standards Association) that fosters improved access to foreign markets by Canadian companies. Although these facts are true, such a view tends to overlook the fact that the CSA Standard is founded upon the Canadian criteria and indicators framework, a scientifically sound, publicly