Family Forest Owners Continue Fight to Participate in Green Markets
The American Forest Foundation voted no against the final draft of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Forest Certification Benchmarks. Only national member organizations of USGBC were able to vote on the Benchmarks after opting into a voting body.
The Benchmarks went through four rounds of public comments and AFF participated in all four rounds, repeatedly stating that the criteria for evaluating certification programs being proposed did not reflect an understanding of the unique challenges of family forest owners. In the end, the Benchmarks remained a complicated credit process that discouraged the use of wood in LEED certified buildings and hurt America’s family-owned forests. Check out this article from Greenwire.
The USGBC is a private organization, and it’s LEED certification system has been a leader in the “green building” movement. Green building, a trend in building construction to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, is the fastest growing construction market in the country, and even in these tough economic times, the market continues to flourish. Green building presents a great opportunity for growing markets for sustainable wood.
Unfortunately, the majority of the wood from certified forests in the United States is not eligible for the Wood Certification credit under LEED. LEED only recognizes wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, not wood certified by the American Tree Farm System® or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. This cuts many family forest owners out of green building markets and millions of acres of sustainably managed forests.
The USGBC designed the Forest Certification Benchmarks to evaluate forest certification systems and to determine which certified wood products should be eligible for points in their green building rating system. Their goal was to use the Benchmarks in place of their specific reference to individual forest certification standards like the Forest Stewardship Council. Unfortunately, the Benchmarks were geared towards certification schemes for industrial, government-owned and other large forest owners. This is troubling, given that the majority of private forests in the U.S. are in small tracts owned by families and individuals.
In addition to not addressing the unique needs of family forest owners, the LEED program continues to discriminate against wood as an energy-efficient and environmentally- friendly building material. When compared with other materials like steel and concrete, wood for construction results in significantly lower carbon emissions, reduced energy use, and reduced air and water pollution. Wood products also store carbon, which helps mitigate climate change.
AFF will continue to work with our partners to enact policies that promote wood products as “green building” materials and to ensure that family forests have strong markets for their wood products market to be able to invest in their land and keep their forests as forests.
