With forest certification being an important tool to maintain and enhance the world's forest resource and significantly contribute to global efforts to reduce forest degradation, PEFC is playing an increasingly prominent role in pushing governments and other stakeholders to recognize the Rio Forest Certification Declaration in their deliberations of the Rio+20 Outcome Document.

"The challenges facing the world's forests, and the inability of governments to act at the first Earth Summit in Rio twenty years ago, resulted in the birth of the idea of forest certification. This voluntary mechanism provided forest owners with the opportunity to demonstrate and validate their responsibly practices through independent certification", said Ben Gunneberg, Secretary General of PEFC International at the recent Regional Preparatory Meeting in Geneva earlier this months. "Yet the movement has stalled: Only nine percent of the world's forests, and only two percent of tropical forests, are certified."

The meeting at the Palais des Nations prepared the contribution from the UNECE region to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), the Rio+20 conference, which will be held from 20 – 22 June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

"What is needed is a common set of principles, a set of principles that provides guidance to all of us about what is needed to better promote forest certification and its continuous growth to advance sustainable forest management", Mr. Gunneberg emphasized. "We need to ensure that all the well-meaning actions by the various stakeholders result in a decrease of forest degradation and an increase in understanding and awareness of the benefits that the world's forests have to offer."

This is the purpose of the Rio Forest Certification Declaration. Launched in 2010 in Rio de Janeiro, the declaration picks up on ideas that have previously emerged in other documents, including the 1992 Rio Declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Agenda 21, the UN Charter, and the Forest Principles, to establish a framework that all stakeholders should be able to support.

"Countless people have already signed the Rio Forest Certification Declaration, and we ask for your support in bringing it to the table in the discussion about the zero draft of the Rio+20 Outcome document, and we ask you to lend it your support by signing it", Mr Gunneberg told the audience.

Major groups will meet for the 2nd Intersessional Meeting of UNCSD at the UN Secretariat in New York City over the next two days to discuss structure and format of the zero draft of the Rio+20 Outcome Document, with PEFC advocating the recognition of forest certification as a tried and tested mechanism promoting sustainable forest management, and well placed to be further promoted and scaled up, in the document.

Further information

• Sign the Rio Forest Certification Declaration
• PEFC International's contribution to the outcomes of the Rio+20 conference