3 June 2015: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) announced a partnership with IKEA to support forest certification in Viet Nam. The partnership aims to identify and evaluate options for and barriers to sustainable forest management (SFM) certification while empowering forest-dependent communities.

The partnership is expected to contribute to IKEA’s commitment to a sustainable and responsible supply chain and plans to undertake studies that will focus on both environmental and social criteria. In particular, the partners’ assessment will seek to place local communities at the center of any SFM certification process and, in doing so, address the barriers to certification often faced by smallholders.

The public-private partnership will also look at how timber can be tracked through the entire supply chain and will consider factors required for scaling up and replicating successful certification processes. [FAO Press Release]