Forest management certifications play a key role in keeping our forests healthy. These voluntary standards add an additional level of assurance of responsible forest practices from a country with some of the strictest provincial and federal regulatory frameworks in the world. Use the map below to learn more about forest certification in Canada.
To navigate the map, simply click on a province of interest within the national map. A detailed provincial map will appear. Then click on any of the coloured blocks of “tenured forest lands” within that province for more details about that particular certification. A Certification Summary will appear in the right column providing detailed information on:
To find further detailed information about the certificate, such as the public audit summary report, please visit the appropriate standard website:
CSA/PEFC Canada: PEFC Database
FSC: FSC Database
SFI: SFI Database and SFI Audit Summary Reports
Tenure—socially defined agreement held by individuals or groups, recognized by legal statutes or customary practice, regarding the “bundle of rights and duties” of ownership, holding, access, and/or use of a particular land unit or the associated resources (such as individual trees, plant species, water, and minerals). (source: National Forestry Database).
In Canada, 94% of forests are publicly owned. This means that the provincial governments provide tenure licensing agreements to forest product companies. Forest management licences issued in Canada are either area-based tenure (a licence agreement based on a specified area of land under management) or volume-based tenure (a licence agreement based on a specified volume of wood to be harvested). The type of tenure a company is granted depends on the provincial government.
In most cases certification applies to an entire forest area held under an area-based tenure. However, there can also be several volume-based tenures held by multiple companies within a particular forest area. In that case the proportion to which the certification applies may be less than the entire forest area (see detailed tenure maps for proportions). The proportions allocated to companies within an area are shown in tables on the detailed tenure maps.
To source certified forest products of a particular forest products company, visit the statistics sections of the websites of the three internationally recognized certification standards:
pefc.org (for CSA/PEFC Canada information) www.ca.fsc.org or www.fsc.org, www.forests.org
If you have questions that were not addressed in our FAQ area, please email: info@fpac.ca
