Registered assessors

PEFC registered assessors are independent consultants responsible for evaluating national forest certification systems against our PEFC requirements.

Registered assessors

PEFC registered assessors are responsible for assessing whether national and regional forest certification systems meet our international requirements - we do not carry out the assessment ourselves.

Registered assessors are independent consultants with suitable qualifications and experience in the field of sustainable forest management. Their assessment forms an important professional and objective basis for the decision to approve and endorse a system.

As well as carrying out the assessment of new national systems, registered assessors also carry out the assessment of both revised and reaffirmed systems.

We are not registering any new assessors at this time.

You can find the contact details of all our registered assessors within the document below:

Independent assessors register

We maintain a register of PEFC registered assessors, forming the basis for the appointment of an assessor for a specific task. The register consists of assessors who we have registered as meeting the qualification and/or expertise in the following categories:

Experience within the forestry sector, on criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, chain of custody, certification, accreditation and auditing.
Competence on the PEFC framework and assessment of certification standards and systems.
Methodological know-how (criteria, standard setting, implementation arrangements, chain of custody, accreditation), data collection, verification procedure, a variety of other methods and their relevance in the assessment process.
Participation in the PEFC registered assessor training.

Appointment of assessors

Once a new or revised national system has been submitted to us for endorsement, we issue an invitation to tender to all the assessors on our register. The assessors have three weeks to submit their proposals and we select the assessor after considering all the proposals. We base this selection on the quality of the proposal, such as their experience and specific competence of the assessment team, and the proposed fee. We also take into account the feedback from the national member responsible for the system.

Training

Registered assessor training, March 2019

Each year, we hold meetings with the assessors to provide them with updates on the assessment process and to gather feedback on opportunities for further improvements, based on the experiences gathered over the previous years.

Previous meetings have enabled the assessors and PEFC International to walk through the assessment process together, identifying areas to improve the quality and transparency of the reporting and in the assessment process itself. In addition to this yearly training, the assessors' performance is regularly reviewed.