How much do forest certification standards address biodiversity dimensions? A comparative assessment of selected standards worldwide.

The recent global ecological crises (i.e., climate, biodiversity, plastic, resources, pollution, land use, etc.) have led the world towards a more and more urgent need for the sustainable use of natural resources. While ceasing the use of some resources seems unfeasible, the responsible use and management of social and natural assets portray an opportunity to contribute to building a more resilient, equitable, and endurable future to embrace the foreseen consequences of these global crises. As for biodiversity, the current crisis has gained much attention in the last decades. Several sectors such as academia, non-profit organizations, the financial and private sector, public bodies, and organizations have placed multiple efforts to assemble a solution that meets the critical demands at several scales of the biodiversity crisis. Nonetheless, biodiversity is context-dependent, multi-scale, complex, and underpins multiple dimensions. This study pretended to, first through experts’ consultation, identify and build a meta-standard containing key criteria and indicators focused on biodiversity maintenance, protection, enhancement, and conservation. Second, from the reference standard, develop a comparative assessment of the extent to which selected forest certification standards address the multiple aspects related to biodiversity and third, to provide lessons learned and inputs on the least covered topics with the aim to contribute to future development and improvement of forest certification schemes. The results show that most of the standards had a strong focus on protecting threatened and endangered species, high conservation value areas, and water bodies. Moreover, the prioritization of connectivity and complexity of the forest addressed landscape biodiversity issues stressed in previous studies to be lacking in forest certification standards, seems to be a widely covered topic in the assessed standards. In contrast, while many biological and ecosystemic problems are widely discussed, critical aspects intrinsically connected to biodiversity are still overlooked. Climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience development, research, education, and capacity-building programs oriented to strengthen the acknowledgement, governance, and sensitivity toward biodiversity are poorly addressed topics in most of the standards.