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Design & Build with FSC:

USGBC and LEED benchmark

See Also

(2010 December) A Path Forward for Certified Wood in LEED

(2010 October) FSC urges vote of “Negative, with reason” to proposed LEED revisions

(2010 June) FSC-US Open Letter on Fourth Draft Benchmark

(2010 March) FSC-US Open Letter on Changes to LEED

(2010) Failings of the Third Draft of the Forest Certification Benchmark

Legal Attack by Conventional Industry

FSC in North America

(2009) USGBC Comment Period on LEED benchmark

(2008) FSC-US Comments on LEED Benchmark

Learn more about LEED

FAQs about FSC and LEED

 

Background

For 10 years, U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system has rewarded responsible forest management through the MRc7 Certified Wood credit, which recognizes wood certified to the high standards of the international Forest Stewardship Council. This single point credit in LEED has been one of the most important drivers for improving forest management in North America, helping bring more than 116 million acres of U.S. and Canadian forestland into compliance with FSC standards. More than a third of these forests have been newly certified in the past two years. As the market for green building and LEED has been expanding exponentially, conventional timber companies have aggressively lobbied the USGBC to recognize their status quo, often destructive practices in the MRc7. In response, the USGBC wisely embarked on the development of an independent benchmark to define what it meant by “exemplary forestry” with the intention of setting objective requirements so that any forest certification system could choose to meet those requirements and thus be recognized in LEED.

Guided by research conducted by Yale University’s School of Forestry, at USGBC’s request, and by more than 3,000 individual sets of stakeholder comments, USGBC has drafted three iterations of a benchmark between August 2008 and today. The product of this work is a broad collection of criteria to define responsible forest management. Now with the issuance of the third draft of the benchmark on February 22, 2010, many are dissatisfied – some feeling that it is too prescriptive, and others fearing it is too lax in certain areas. The conventional timber industry is alarmed because the status quo systems they have developed ignore or fail to meet the thresholds of key criteria in the benchmark. Environmental NGOs and progressive companies are frustrated by the low number of prerequisites, some ambiguously worded criteria, and a failure to recognize the importance of open, member-elected, multi-stakeholder governance in forest certification systems. FSC’s perspective is closely aligned with that of the progressive companies and environmental NGOs.