WCS 3-Sentence Science

Can an Intact Forest be Certified?

November 22, 2019

CREDIT: JULIE LARSEN MAHER/WCS

Each year, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists publish more than 300 peer-reviewed studies and papers. “WCS 3-Sentence Science” is a regular tip-sheet — in bite sized helpings — of some of this published work.

Here we present work by WCS’s Timothy Rayden on the certification of intact forests.

1. Researchers explore challenges for incorporating intact forests — natural and often extensive forests free from apparent degradation — into certification processes, and of maintaining intact forests within forest management units.
2. Authors say it will require a re-evaluation of the way intactness is treated within current certification standards, and the requirements for forestry within intact forests might be necessary to create a form of compensation to overcome the foregone costs of intact forest preservation.
3. Eventually, intact forest conservation and socially and economically viable forest management can only be reconciled on the landscape scale.

Study and Journal: “The dilemma of maintaining intact forest through certification” from Frontiers in Forests and Global Change
WCS Co-Author(s): Timothy Rayden, Sustainable Landscapes Unit, WCS Conservation Science and Solutions

For more information, contact: Stephen Sautner, 718–220–3682, ssautner@wcs.org.