Forest Management Certification Pre-assessment of Spray Lake Sawmills

Letter by AWA to Smartwood. Smartwood are the auditors for Spray Lake Sawmills’ application to receive Forest Stewardship Council certification for sustainable management of the forests in their Forest Management Agreement area in Kananaskis and the Ghost.

“While AWA believes that SLS’s interest in receiving certification for their forestry operations is significant and desirable, we also believe their current standards of forestry operations are inadequate to qualify them for FSC certification. It is our hope that FSC certification, under your direction, will be a goal that they will work towards achieving but we are not comfortable supporting their application given current logging practices that are far from an ecosystem based approach.  We believe that solid evidence of a number of significant changes would be required before SLS could be considered for certification.”