(Bogor, March 28 2007): The Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Indone­sian Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute (LEI), Tau­fiq Alimi stated that LEI will launch the phased for­est cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem with the aim to reduce the var­i­ous prob­lems of for­est man­age­ment in Indonesia.

“The sys­tem con­sists of pro­ce­dure, stan­dard and insti­tu­tional mat­ter of which a lttle dif­fer­ent com­pared to the con­ven­tional cer­ti­fi­ca­tion,” he said on Tues­day (27/2)
“The essence of the phased cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is the arrange­ment of action plan in var­i­ous phases to enable a for­est man­age­ment unit acquires a fair and sus­tain­able cer­tifi­cate,” he added.

Var­i­ous obser­va­tions and researches The Indone­sian Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute have per­formed indi­cated that the for­est con­di­tion is expe­ri­enc­ing a severe rate of destruc­tion due to ille­gal log­ging activ­ity, for­est fire, ille­gal land occu­pa­tion and other destruc­tive activ­i­ties.
The sit­u­a­tion gets worse despite the government’s efforts such as pol­icy improve­ment, law enforce­ment, advo­cacy, land reha­bil­i­ta­tion, etc to estab­lish a good and sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment prac­tice.
“In order to assist the gov­ern­ment in reduc­ing the var­i­ous prob­lem, LEI launches its phased cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem,” Tau­fiq said.

The phased cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem pro­vides the oppor­tu­nity for the man­age­ment unit to grad­u­ally man­age itself. The sys­tem is bet­ter com­pared to the pre­vi­ous sys­tem of which focus is on com­ply­ing var­i­ous require­ments and indi­ca­tors of for­est man­age­ment stan­dard in one assess­ment at the same time.
The man­age­ment plan­ning is per­formed by the man­age­ment unit based on the inputs pro­vided by var­i­ous part­ners (stake­hold­ers) that share the same com­mit­ment in address­ing the pro­duc­tion, social and envi­ron­men­tal problems.

Tau­fiq added that LEI and all of its con­stituents such as the gov­ern­ment, envi­ron­men­tal activist, aca­d­e­mics and busi­ness sec­tor are com­mit­ted to put the best effort in pro­vid­ing guar­an­tee so that the pjased cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem can be oper­ated and achieve the main goal of cre­at­ing sus­tain­able for­est areas.
“How­ever, an inde­pen­dent third party is required in order to main­tain the imple­men­ta­tion of objec­tive cer­ti­fi­ca­tion processes.

The third party will assess the impact gen­er­ated from the imple­mented strat­egy, the rate of suc­cess and achieve­ment towards a sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment prac­tices. It is hoped that at the last period of the sys­tem, Indone­sia can achieve the stan­dard of sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment prac­tice..
At the moment there are 11 man­age­ment units and one indus­try that have been cer­ti­fied by LEI man­ag­ing a total for­est area size of 1,049.711,37 ha or approx­i­mately 1,5 % of the total Indone­sian for­est area. LEI is a non-profit inde­pen­dent insti­tu­tion with no polit­i­cal inter­est. The insti­tu­tion goal is solely to restore the sus­tain­able and green func­tion of the for­est. (T.Ve/Tr/toeb/b)