The Business Case
The Netherlands has a long track record to lead the highest adoption of certified tropical timber in the world. Growing evidence demonstrates that in the many tropical countries with weak or failing governmental forest protection FSC certification is by far the best way to protect the forest. Why? Because certification gives the tropical forest a commercial value that inherently includes conservation and thus requires protection from the owner. With the IDH tropical timber program I have worked on improving the investment case for certifying tropical forest versus the alternative of chopping it. Since 2009 the IDH program resulted in scaling of certification of tropical forest by adding 9 mln ha of tropical forest. This is half of the 18mln ha world total! (https://ic.fsc.org/en/certification-of-tropical-forests ).
Red the full article here: http://www.centralafricanforests.org/wp-content/uploads/CAFF-6-Tropical-forest-Use-it-or-lose-it.pdf