Current Situations Of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certification In China And Malaysia

Forest Stewardship Council(FSC)is an organization that aims to promote environmentally friendly,socially and economically sound forest management.Although FSC certification scheme is globally recognized and adopted in many countries,the impacts of the certification scheme are still unclear.Corrective Action Requests(CARs)analysis was conducted to study the pattern of 2171 CARs issued to the 14 Forest Management Units(FMUs)in Malaysia and 82 FMUs in China,and their variance in different groups of FMUs.This study also investigated the impacts of FSC forest certification on the management practices of FMUs from China and Malaysia.The effect of FSC forest certification on forest cover change was studied using panel data analysis to validate its effectiveness in mitigating deforestation.The descriptive statistics of CARs revealed that the main issued CARs for the FMUs in China and Malaysia were related to forest management issues and environmental issues,respectively.Results showed that the forest certification scheme is useful in improving FMUs’ forest management practices with a decreasing trend of the number of CARs since the first year of certification.The forest certification was found not significantly related to the forest cover change in the panel data analysis,thus there was no evidence to prove the usefulness of forest certification in mitigating deforestation.This study provided information on CARs study in China and Malaysia which can be utilized in the future study,validated the role of FSC forest certification in promoting Sustainable Forest Management(SFM)in the FMUs,and revealed that other approaches such as policies intervention are necessary to stop deforestation in the nation.