Australian
Forestry
Standard

Developed between 1999 and 2002, the Australian Forestry Standard is Australia's first forest management standard. An expert technical committee approved the final draft in August 2002.

The Australian Forestry Standard or (AFS) applies community values and the science of forest management to identify the economic, social, environmental and indigenous criteria that are most important for assessing whether a forest is well-managed.

The process for developing the AFS involved full consultation with a wide range of stakeholders and was overseen by the independent organisation Standards Australia 0 which has now published the Standard as Interim Standard AS 4708

Independent third party certifiers implement the AFS under a process overseen by Joint Accreditation Systems of Australia and New Zealand (JAS-ANZ). The AFS is based on internationally agreed criteria, and embodies both forest management systematic and performance based criteria that to support continuous improvement toward sustainable wood production in Australia.

The AFS will support a Chain of Custody standard that allows labelling of wood products.

Gunns has actively participated in the creation of the AFS, and is the first company to achieve AFS certification. More details at:
http://www.forestrystandard.org.au/paper01.html

The Australian Forestry Standard is expected to achieve mutual recognition with the Pan European Forest Certification Council by mid-2004. PEFC is the most objective forest certification system in the world, with the widest coverage of forestlands. At its core is a set of sustainable forest management criteria and indicators agreed at a series of inter-government agreements made in Montreal and Helsinki, and endorsed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Since its launch in 1999, PEFC has become the largest forest certification umbrella organisation, covering national schemes from all over the world.