Browsing by Subject "forest certification"

Prior to the start of the war in Ukraine in early 2022, the Russian Federation was home to not only 20% of the world’s forests, but surprisingly also the highest number of certified forests in the world. The present study analyzed how forest certification, under the FSC and PEFC schemes, has been used in the Russian Federation by forest industry actors and government actors, with particular attention to the motivations for participation and perceived benefits of participation in the programs. This study is important because the need for a global sustainability transition is not limited to certain regime types, and the best methods to encourage transition within one context may not work within all other contexts. This study helps to fill the gap in the understanding of how and why forestry certification may be utilized in both the authoritarian context, and within the context of the Russian Federation. Based on the research, it was hypothesized that the Russian Federation participated in forest certification programs primarily for economic reasons, driven mainly by the demand of environmentally sensitive Western markets. It was hypothesized that the weak, rather than strong, sustainability is present in the Russian Federation and that the results would reflect this by being skewed strongly towards a single pillar: economic. Rather than carrying out the programs in truth, it was believed that forest certification was greenwashing–intended to create and maintain an image of the Russian Federation as an environmentally friendly nation. The study was conducted using the method of content analysis. A total of 232 documents from a selection of state and industry sources were coded inductively with codes sorted according to the three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social. In contrast to the hypothesis of the study, that economic codes would dominate–environmental codes were the most present, accounting for 41.8% of total occurrences. While unexpected, the findings of this study have helped to strengthen the assertions of previous scholars that forest certification is not all that it seems. The dominance of environmental codes in forest certification discourse contrasts with existing scholarly evidence regarding the environmental degradation present in Russia–generating more questions than this study is equipped to answer. Future study on the topic of forest certification and greenwashing in the Russian Federation is necessary to provide further clarity on the topic.