Sustainable development of forests

The sustainable development of forests constitutes a development of the forest that makes it possible to meet the present needs without compromising those of the future generation.
Forests represent an important socio-economic and environmental heritage. Indeed, they provide wood and other forest products, but they also represent a place of relaxation. They contribute to the landscapes and provide a habitat for flora and faun. They protect soils and water quality. Moreover, on a worldwide level, they contribute to the fight against desertification and have an incidence on the greenhouse effect by capturing the atmospheric carbon.
That is why, for some years, forests are the main subject of the international issues, on desertification, protection of nature and greenhouse effect. Thus, faced to the persistent attacks to the worldwide heritage, the sustainable development notion has become omnipresent in all international debates linked to environment and forests, to overcome degradations while maintaining the productive potential of forests goods and services.
In order to guaranty the sustainable development, different certification systems have been implemented (more than 40 systems are counted through the world).
Those systems make it possible to guaranty that the wood used in a product comes from a forest managed in conformity with the forests certification rules established in one of the existing systems :

Two systems are present in France :

The FSC system (10 principles)
The PEFC system (6 criteria)

They represent the two leader systems in terms of surface with more than 70 of the 110 million hectares of certified forests around the world.

What ever the chosen system may be, the forest certification has two levels :

• a certification of forest sustainable development of forest massifs, made by the public and private owners.
• a certification of the chain of control guarantying the traceability of the wood coming from those certified forests during all the time of the processing chain (1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd ) , made by professionals of wood industry.