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The US Green Building Council (USGBC) is currently reexamining how the LEED Green Building Rating System awards credits for the use of certified wood. A proposal for assessing different certification schemes for qualification in the LEED system is currently open to public review and comment. FSC-US and our partners in forest stewardship have deep concerns with the proposed assessment and urge you to provide comments to USGBC. The development and application of this assessment tool by USGBC has tremendous potential to affect the credibility of the LEED standard and to diminish the capacity of FSC to improve forest management practices in the US.

USGBC has developed a set of metrics (referred to as benchmarks) by which multiple certification schemes may be measured. In general, we support the benchmark approach as a transparent and effective mechanism to evaluate forest certification schemes and their capacity to meet USGBC objectives. Additionally, this is an opportunity to clarify the strengths and shortcomings of the different schemes. However, we believe that the current state of the benchmarks do not adequately differentiate between the certification schemes that demand truly exemplary forest management from those that certify conventional and sometimes destructive forest management. Our key concerns are:

• The assessment process is wholly undefined. There are no guidelines describing how the benchmarks will be applied and who will conduct the evaluation. We do not know if all benchmarks are obligatory or if a scoring scheme will be employed. If the latter becomes the case, we don’t know if any of the benchmarks are obligatory and what scores might represent acceptability by USGBC. This makes any detailed comments on the benchmarks secondary.
• While some benchmarks are strong and clear, many are ambiguous or set an unacceptably low bar for compliance.
• Fundamental aspects of forest management and Chain-of-Custody certification have been completely ignored.

Please contact Dr. Gary Dodge, FSCUS Director of Science and Certification (gdodge@fscus.org) for a more detailed analysis of the USGBC proposal, benchmarks, and other documents. We urge you to submit comments on both the lack of definition of the process and the alarming potential to lower the bar for recognizing exemplary forest management. Comments are due before 2:00 pm (Eastern Time) September 7, 2008.

This article is part of the following newsletter: August 2008

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