Stepwise technical support programmes

Stepwise technical support programmes are NGO initiatives aimed at helping companies to achieve forest certification. Examples of these are WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN), The Forest Trust (TFT) and Rainforest Alliance’s SmartStep. They are not designed to be used as legality verification per se although participants of these programmes have to demonstrate legal compliance as part of validating progress towards forest certification. In addition, two NGO initiatives focus on achieving legality verification. These are the Tropical Forest Foundation (TFF) and Timber Trade Action Plan (TTAP). The TFF developed a standard for Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) in 2006, which was revised in 2008 and 2009. The RIL standard is not equivalent to a legality verification system but contains a legality component. TFF does not carry out verification, but endorses the verification audit carried out by an independent auditor.

The Timber Trade Action Plan (TTAP), managed by The Forest Trust (TFT) is a private sector project that provides technical assistance to suppliers of the members of European TTFs to achieve legality verification of their supply chains. It is not a legality verification system. TTAP provides assistance to forest managers or manufacturers to achieve legality verification, by using TTAP legality checklists developed for a range of producer/processing countries to identify the gaps. TFT provides technical assistance throughout the whole supply chain to raise the level of management to pass an audit against the legality standard requested by the buyer and supplier.