Experts highlight opportunities to further advance PEFC’s assessment process

27 June 2014 News

There are opportunities to streamline the assessment process of national forest certification systems, according to meetings held earlier this year with PEFC Panel of Experts members and PEFC Registered Assessors.

Assessors and Panel of Expert members play an important role in PEFC. With PEFC being the only global forest certification system that requires all standards to be independently developed with multi-stakeholder participation, any national forest certification systems that seeks PEFC endorsement is subject to the rigorous PEFC assessment process to ensure their system meets PEFC’s Sustainability Benchmarks. This process is led by an independent, PEFC Registered Assessor and includes a sixty day global public consultation as well as a review by the PEFC Panel of Experts, which provides quality assurance in the endorsement process.

Earlier this year, PEFC held meetings with both the PEFC Registered Assessors and the Panel of Experts members to provide updates on the assessment process and to gather feedback on opportunities for further improvements, based on the experiences gather over the past few years. 

Panel of Experts members highlighted potential for improvements in terms of the clarity of justification and argumentation in the assessment reports, which should be understandable without the need to consult referenced documentation in order to streamline the process. 

Participants of the Registered Assessors meeting focussed their discussion on how to make the assessment process more efficient and prevent unnecessary delays. The meeting also included a training that aimed at increasing the usability of assessment reports in terms of clarity of information and overall length of the reports.

The meetings and trainings were part of PEFC’s quality assurance work to ensure the robustness of the PEFC assessment process.