The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), along with others worldwide, shares the commitment to ensuring the health and resilience of forests. The European Union has identified the United States and Canada as low-risk countries for deforestation, and SFI has taken further action to reduce risk through the SFI Standards. With the European Commission’s recent release of its EUDR simplification review, we have yet to see a reduced burden for certified products from low-risk countries.

We believe that SFI certification is well positioned to meet global deforestation and degradation policies, such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). We have also introduced new tools specifically to demonstrate compliance with EUDR. We encourage competent authorities to recognize forest certification like SFI and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) to help provide assurances of no deforestation and forest degradation in low-risk countries.

The SFI 2022 Forest Management Standard, in place since January 2022, prevents deforestation, forest degradation, and does not support forest lands converted to other land uses including natural forests to plantations. 

SFI Positioned to Meet Global Deforestation and Degradation Policies – forests.org