The Center for Forest and Wood Certification (CFWC)

The Center for Forest and Wood Certification builds regional forest and wood certification capacity through the delivery of unbiased information; technical assistance; and the development of programs for landowners, loggers, and forest products industries to participate in certification in a sustainable and affordable manner.

The Center focuses on providing solutions to certification bottlenecks, enabling the private sector to effectively participate and benefit from certification. The Center's programs include education and training; technical assistance for forest industries; group certification for forest owners, loggers, and industry; certification management; and sustainability solutions for firms using wood.

Those participating with the Center are assisting in building their expertise and technical prowess so they can make informed decisions about their involvement with certification assisting interested participants to develop their own certification programs. The Center is also focused on determining and documenting obstacles to certification, developing tools that work to enable certification, and designs market solutions to help those interested in participating in forest and wood certification.

The founding and managing partners include:

• Central Kentucky Forest Management, Inc.,
• Foresters, LLC.
• Kentucky Forest Industry Association
• Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development, (MACED)
• NewPage Corp.
• Somerset Wood Products
• And the University of Kentucky Department of Forestry were the Center is housed

The CFWC was developed in 2010.  Initial group certification audits were conducted in late December 2011 by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS). SCS awarded the Center with group Forest management (FM) and Chain of Custody (CoC) certificates in February 2012 from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), American Tree Farm (ATF), and the Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI). 

Currently (2018) there are 44 CoC members (8 new members added in 2018). CFWC COC group members produced 24,101,960 million dollars of certified products in 2016 and had over 111,630,101 Million dollars of non-certified sales.  Without the CFWC these small businesses that are located all over the eastern half of the US may not have been able to produce and sell these products without the CFWC and the support provided from UK Forestry Extension to the CFWC members. These businesses employed 669 people in 2017/18.