Enabling and enhancing environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests

Knowing the origin and life cycle of product constituents is important for both retailers and consumers. Independent certification provides manufacturers with confidence about their environmental and social integrity. The international standard developed by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) provides a globally accepted route to forest management certification. FSC’s mission is to “promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world's forests”. However, forest certification has a number of challenges, especially the reliance on limited field inspection and the extrapolation of limited observations to support certification decisions very large forest areas. Increasing either the intensity or frequency of certification audits would be prohibitively expensive and unacceptable to the forestry community. TransparentForests aims to overcome these limitations, by allowing relevant stakeholders to visualise and share key management data with each other, in the context of independent customised date stamped maps and change maps, where the dates reflect the audit period. It also aims to provide a communication platform allowing stakeholders to create and safely share information.