What has come to light is only part of a far larger fraud "iceberg" which, were it fully exposed, would sink the entire organisation.
The ever-growing number of fraud cases threatens to destroy, once and for all, the reputation of FSC, the sustainable timber certification organisation. Action is needed before it is too late!
- At the FSC General Assembly taking place in Panama this week, delegates will vote on the certification scheme's policies and priorities, including how to combat fraud. A leading FSC auditor has called this General Assembly the "last chance to save FSC"
- FSC investigations launched on the back of third-party research uncover and address only a fraction of much wider systemic problems
- An analysis of the situation by Earthsight indicates that fraudulently certified goods worth $10-30 billion are sold every year
- Timber industry companies in FSC's economic chamber have blocked every previous attempt to stamp out fraud by introducing mandatory traceability. They can no longer ignore this problem.
- FSC members at the General Assembly must support Motion 30, which provides for the introduction of mandatory traceability. They should press to strengthen it by bringing forward the deadline and removing the requirement for a second vote at the 2028 General Assembly.
- NGO members of FSC's environmental and social chambers should stage a mass walkout if industry representatives once again reject this opportunity
- This is not FSC's only serious problem. But if FSC cannot take even the most basic steps needed to stamp out widespread fraud, the organisation should be wound up
How widespread is fraud in the FSC system?
FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) is the world's largest green labelling organisation. Almost half of all consumers worldwide recognise its tree logo, [1] which appears on a wide range of goods, from paper napkins to furniture, timber, books and even clothing made from wood fibres. Some 80% of those consumers trust the logo as a guarantee that these products do no harm to forests.[2] They are being misled.
In truth, there is a strong chance that the products people buy have not come from FSC-certified "sustainable" forests. The raw material used to make them may even have been illegally sourced.
Fraud is widespread throughout the FSC supply chain
It has been uncovered across a broad range of FSC-certified products, including furniture, toilet paper, paper plates, charcoal, flooring and pellets. Systematic fraud has been found involving a wide variety of tree species — from the tropics, from other forested regions, and in both hardwood and softwood. Although the biggest problems are in China, serious cases of fraud have been uncovered all over the world, including in Europe and the United States.
The fraud epidemic at FSC has not been confined to small, less professional companies. Large firms have repeatedly been found guilty of deliberate, systematic fraud in their sector involving huge volumes of timber. They include China's largest plywood exporter,[3] one of the largest sawmills in Europe,[4] and the fifth-largest wood pellet producer in the world. [5]Fraudulent FSC-certified goods have been found on sale in the chains of several of the world's biggest retailers, including IKEA, Aldi and Lidl.
How do we know the problem is wider than the examples we know about? Because almost every case that has come to light was found not through FSC's own systems, but through research by independent NGOs and journalists, or through reports from within the industry. Without this unofficial oversight, the problem would still be unknown. Very few NGOs and journalists carry out this kind of investigation, and their research covers only a tiny fraction of the vast trade in FSC-certified products.
In almost every case, possible FSC fraud was not what was being looked for; it was spotted while investigating other matters.[6] We can therefore be confident that what they have uncovered, and what FSC has confirmed, is only part of a much, much larger fraud "iceberg" across the whole FSC system. The problem is big enough to bring about the collapse of the entire organisation were it exposed in full.
Further evidence of growing fraud in the FSC system comes from the widening mismatch between the volume of FSC-certified timber produced and the number of companies licensed to process it.
Since the exclusion of Russia and Belarus in March 2022, the global area of FSC forest has fallen by 30%. Yet over the same period the number of chain of custody certificate holders (timber processing companies licensed to handle FSC-certified wood) has risen by 37%.
In China, twelve new chain of custody certificates are issued every day.[7] Put simply, there is not enough genuine FSC-certified timber to go round.
An inadequate response
Even where fraud is uncovered in a particular supply chain and action is taken, FSC has failed to stamp it out. Companies involved in fraud have been able to switch certification body and obtain new certificates only days or months after their previous ones expired. Usually a simple change of company name is enough.[27]You might think a large-scale case would have a broader deterrent effect, at least among producers of a particular product in a particular market. The evidence suggests the opposite. Take the plywood problem. In 2021, two separate investigations concluded that China's largest plywood exporter was guilty of deliberate, large-scale and systematic falsification of the FSC label.[28] The company was expelled from the system. Four years on, the faking of FSC certificates in the Chinese plywood sector remains unchanged.
In November 2024, one of China's largest veneer producers offered Earthsight investigators fake FSC labels for Russian birch plywood, to be imported into Europe with forged Chinese-origin paperwork in breach of European Union sanctions.[29]
In April 2025, isotope testing revealed that almost half of the certified birch plywood products sold in the United Kingdom carried false country-of-origin claims. [30] The study did not break out false claims on FSC products separately from those on products certified by its competitor PEFC, but a close reading of the data shows that at least 36% of FSC claims were false.[31]Even where deliberate, large-scale fraud has been proven, the penalties FSC imposes are trivial and poorly enforced.
FSC's main tool against fraud is to blacklist those responsible from the FSC system. But even when companies do not sidestep the ban by registering under a slightly different name, blacklisting is time-limited and rather flexible. When An Viet Phat Energy, the fifth-largest wood pellet producer in the world, was found guilty of fraud in Vietnam, it was supposed to be excluded from the system for 3.5 years. [32]Yet after just 14 months the company was allowed to resume trading.[33] At the same time, China's largest plywood exporter, found guilty of fraud twice over, was also allowed to regain its FSC certificates.[34]
Earthsight researchers were offered Russian plywood by the Polish company Alvi-Bel, which held an FSC certificate at the time.
Estimating the scale of the fraud
How much is the fraud really worth? When individual cases come to light, figures for the fraudulent sales are rarely published. In one case where a calculation was made — for a single producer and a single product — it was estimated that 100,000 tonnes of veneer were involved.[35] Reasonable estimates suggest that would have been worth around $100 million.
One of the many charcoal fraud cases uncovered by NGOs and confirmed by FSC involved 18,000 tonnes of mislabelled goods with a retail value, at retail prices, of $50 million.[36]When IKEA uncovered fraud involving birch products certified under the FSC system in 2020, it covered 95 different product lines. The company sought to play down the scale of the fraud by noting that it affected only 0.28% of its wood use that year.[37] But that turned out to amount to 53,200 cubic metres of roundwood equivalent — enough timber to fill twenty Olympic swimming pools. [38] In the United Kingdom, the fraud was found to have affected 26,767 wooden items, which is how many pieces of furniture the UK authorities seized.[39] Given IKEA's sales in that country, this implies that almost 400,000 items worldwide were caught up in this kind of fraudulent scheme,[40] with a value that could reach $100 million.
When you look for fraud in the FSC system, you almost always find it...
Total sales of FSC-certified products were estimated at $20 billion in 2007.[41]Based on the growth in FSC-certified forest area and allowing for inflation, that figure is now likely to be $100 billion. If just one per cent of those products were fraudulent, it would mean that at least $1 billion worth of falsely labelled goods bearing the FSC mark are sold every year. Given that whenever anyone looks for fraud in the FSC system they almost always find it, the real figure is likely to be at least $10 billion, and possibly far more. FSC's former integrity director, Phil Guillery, has said that in his view 20-30% of FSC claims are false.[42] That would mean fraudulent transactions worth $30 billion every year.
Deep-rooted denial and false solutions
Although the FSC Secretariat claims to support volume accounting as "an essential step towards further strengthening integrity in FSC supply chains", it is undermining the motion's chances of being adopted by denying the true scale of the problem and overstating the impact of the measures already taken to address it. [43]
FSC representatives' first line of defence in such situations is to cite the cases they have "successfully uncovered" as proof that the problem is being dealt with — yet, as we have seen, those cases in fact prove the opposite. The credit for uncovering them almost always belongs to other bodies, and there is good reason to believe they are only the tip of the iceberg. FSC does not mention how often its feeble penalties are successfully sidestepped, or fail to prevent repeat offending.
FSC's second line of defence might be called the "blind them with science" strategy
The impact of the new technologies FSC likes to boast about, claiming they are how it fights fraud, is overstated. One is the use of scientific testing to determine the origin of timber. In reality such technology can at best identify the country where the wood was harvested, and even that is only possible for the limited range of species for which enough sampling research has been done. Very few of the fraud cases uncovered over the years by NGOs and journalists and confirmed by FSC could have been detected by such methods. They can only detect cases involving the laundering of different tree species or of timber from different countries, whereas the uncertified wood most likely to be passed off as FSC is of the same species and from the same country.
The second "miracle cure" championed by FSC is blockchain technology. Blockchain can only help secure information if that information exists in the first place, and the traceability system FSC plans to use (known as FSC Trace)[44] is voluntary (except for supply chains already shown to carry a high risk of fraud). When FSC previously set up a similar voluntary system, take-up was so negligible that it was scrapped.[45] Until mandatory volume tracking is introduced, blockchain is likely to have very little information to verify. FSC Trace does not allow the full volume control needed to stamp out fraud.[46]
FSC's last chance
FSC's Motion 30 states that "taking no action risks a loss or reduction of trust in the system, causing 'significant harm to FSC'".[47] There is evidence that trust has already fallen.
When FSC surveyed consumers of wood products in July 2021, its "net trust" rating was 43%. [48] Eighteen months later that figure had fallen to 11%.[49] At the same time, FSC is becoming less relevant as lawmakers overtake it in ambition. The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) will soon come into force for large companies, banning illegal and deforestation-linked timber from one of the world's largest markets. The law requires companies to carry out due diligence that ensures no more than "negligible risk" that their products fail to meet its requirements. It also requires full traceability back to the point of harvest. FSC can currently deliver neither. FSC has created a voluntary "regulatory module" which it claims will ensure compliance with the EUDR, but so far take-up has been close to zero.[50]
It is no surprise that Preferred by Nature, a leading FSC audit firm, has called this General Assembly the "last chance to save FSC".[51] Fraud is not the only reason Preferred by Nature and others say so. In 2021, ahead of the previous General Assembly, 34 NGOs from around the world, including Greenpeace, published an open letter setting out five recommendations. [52]One of them was preventing fraud through mandatory traceability, but the others matter too, remain unaddressed, and are not even on the agenda of the 2025 General Assembly. Within the field of fraud and false claims there are important issues that Motion 30 will not tackle.
If FSC cannot take the simple steps needed to prevent fraud, there is little hope of other important changes being made. That is why the vote at the FSC General Assembly must be seen as decisive.
A red line for civil society?
FSC members must not only support Motion 30, but seek to strengthen it before it is adopted.
The motion's main weakness: it merely authorises the FSC Secretariat to develop a mandatory traceability system. Before it is introduced in 2028, it will still have to be approved by a second vote at a General Assembly. That means that even if the motion passes, FSC's timber industry members will still be able to overturn it within two years. Why should we think they would want to? Because they have done it before.
In 2013 FSC launched a new "online claims platform" on which companies could report the volumes of FSC-certified timber they produced, bought and sold, allowing those figures to be compared to ensure that no more FSC timber was sold than was harvested. A later vote at an FSC General Assembly on a motion to make the system mandatory was defeated by a veto from the companies in FSC's economic chamber.
There is another problem with Motion 30: it calls for the system, if approved in 2028, to be introduced with a "target date" of 2030. FSC cannot afford to wait another five years before tackling the widespread fraud across its system. That is a woefully unambitious timetable, and members should seek to amend it too.
To keep the measure from failing, it is vital that the timber trade companies understand how seriously the NGO community takes this issue and what the consequences will be if they reject it. NGO members of the environmental and social chambers must make clear that if anti-fraud measures are voted down again, there will be a mass walkout.
The fraud and false claims that Motion 30 will not fix
Mandatory volume reconciliation, as proposed in FSC's Motion 30, would be a major step towards rescuing FSC's diminished reputation and relevance. But it is not the only serious problem with the abuse of the certification scheme's claims. Two other important issues also need addressing.
The first is fraud at the point of origin. New systems ensuring that the FSC products sold match the timber harvested as FSC will not solve the problem of fraud where the wood comes from. Over the past five years Earthsight has published a series of damning reports revealing how illegally harvested timber has secured FSC certification. In none of these cases had the processors and manufacturers mislabelled uncertified timber — the issue Motion 30 promises to address. The problems arose within the FSC-certified forest itself, or at the moment its timber was sold to the first processor.
One of the main forms of fraud Earthsight uncovered in Russia involved a company increasing its harvesting volumes in its FSC-certified area and then pretending the timber had come from there. We at Earthsight found this by using satellite imagery to calculate the actual felling areas and volumes, then comparing them with the figures declared to FSC auditors. Our analysis indicated that over five years a single company had funnelled 535,000 cubic metres of uncertified timber into FSC supply chains.[53] FSC auditors are under no obligation to carry out the kind of checks that would expose such fraud. That must change.
Second, there is the problem of the misuse of FSC chain of custody certificates. It has been well known for some time that most holders of FSC CoC (chain of custody) certificates do not buy certified timber at all.[54] Some of these firms commit fraud by falsely labelling the goods they sell as made from FSC-certified timber. In most cases, the reason companies pay for CoC certification is the chance to claim falsely that it alone confers so-called green credentials on their products, regardless of whether those products actually carry the FSC mark. Certification specialists are well aware that a CoC certificate on its own is meaningless, but that is not true of most retailers and customers of wood products. As we said back in 2021, "the internet is awash with wood product manufacturers and retailers advertising these certificates and misleadingly claiming they are proof of their sustainability". [55]
Little has changed.
This month we published further examples of this practice.[56] It is utterly baffling to the public that a company can obtain a "green" certificate without using any "green" timber. Education is not the answer. As experts have been urging for more than a decade, FSC could solve this problem overnight simply by refusing to let companies that do not buy certified timber hold and advertise a CoC certificate. FSC has just announced that it will now require CoC holders that do not use FSC timber to be flagged as such in the FSC database. That is a welcome step for other reasons, but it will do nothing to stop companies continuing to present their certificates in deliberately dishonest ways.