Become a PEFC notified certification body

If you are a certification body looking to offer PEFC certification to forest owners and/or companies in the supply chain you need to take care of the following things: accreditation, training, and notification.

Accreditation

We only work with certification bodies that follow ISO rules and our own requirements for certification bodies. This is demonstrated by a valid accreditation. The accreditation needs to be issued by an accreditation body that is a member of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) or IAF’s Regional Accreditation Groups.

Forest management

To carry out Forest Management certification you will need an accreditation against ISO 17021. PEFC Technical Document Annex 6 contains the PEFC specific requirements.

Chain of custody

To operate PEFC chain of custody certification you will need an accreditation against ISO 17065 and PEFC ST 2002, 2001 and 2003. PEFC ST 2003 contains the PEFC specific requirements. This accreditation needs to be issued by an accreditation body that is also a signatory of the IAF Multilateral Recognition Agreement (MLA) for product certification.

Training

Before carrying out PEFC chain of custody certification, all auditors, reviewers, and certification decision makers must attend an initial PEFC chain of custody training, recognised by PEFC International. Certification bodies need to ensure that their auditors have attended such training before they can start auditing.

For those already qualified, they are required to receive a refresher training every two years, and whenever there is a new issuance of the PEFC Chain of Custody or PEFC Trademarks standard. 

Your auditors, reviewers and certification decision makers can attend a training session organised by PEFC International, or certification bodies can get their internal training programme recognised by PEFC. 

In addition, to become qualified to carry out PEFC RED II certification, your auditors, reviewers, and certification decision makers need to have completed the PEFC RED II General Training.

You can find the upcoming trainings on the right and the complete list of trainings on our website. If you need more information you can contact us at training@pefc.org. Please note, PEFC RED II certification training is through our e-learning platform and can be taken at any time.

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Notification

You will need to get approval, or “notification”, from PEFC in order to issue PEFC recognised certificates. With the required accreditation in place, the PEFC notification is granted by signing a notification contract with PEFC.

If you are operating in a country with a PEFC national member, you will need to get your PEFC notification from the particular national member. If you operate in more than one country, you will need to sign contracts with each of the applicable national members. 

When you are operating in a country without a national member, you will need to get your PEFC notification from PEFC International. When a national member is established in that country, the administration will be handed over to the national member and you will be contacted in order to sign a new notification contract with the national member. 

The document below lists the countries with a PEFC national member that can issue PEFC notifications. If a country is not listed in the document, then please contact PEFC International at info@pefc.org:

Once the contract is signed, you will be included in our list of PEFC Notified Certification Bodies. Then, you need to report every PEFC certificate that you issue to us, along with information on the certified entity, as requested by PEFC, and we register the certificate on our online database. Part of the notification is the payment of a notification fee for every certificate that is issued. National members may establish different fees.