SUSTAINABILITY
Maintaining and monitoring wood using sustainable practices
Faced with growing demands, GSEZ
has made sustainability, traceability, and certification one of
its top priorities. All of Gabon’s forest concessions are allocated according to the sustainable
forest management practices prescribed by the Gabonese Forest Code. In terms of traceability,
since October 2018, GSEZ has benefited from the services of the Tracer-Nkok agency, which
filters the logs entering the zone to limit the risk of illegal timber. In the next five years, all the
country’s forest concessions will be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and
PAFC/PEFC Gabon to improve the traceability of the wood and respect for communities and
workers.
Traceability
Collaboration between GSEZ, FRM
(Gabon), and Brain Forest, guarantees a 100%
supply of wood from known and legal origins.
Tracer ensures that all the logs entering the zone
have a barcode on them that gives the GPS coordinates of the log’s origin. The tracer initiative
ensures the traceability of logs sourced from the forest to the 85 factories operating in GSEZ.
Gabon Nature Panels collects wood residues from factories that are ethically and sustainably
sourcing wood logs. We adhere to strict standard operating procedures pertaining to the
collection of wood residues, to ensure that the wood residues are collected from tracer adhering
factories. This ensures that our vision to create sustainable boards is achieved.
Responsible Forestry
FSC certification is the verification of forest industry/wood processing entities of their responsible, sustainable, and credible operations. The certification makes their final products suitable for value-added and mature markets.
GSEZ is working aggressively to make all the loggable forests FSC certified, ensuring that only FSC certified logs enter GSEZ for transformation. To date, more than 5,00,000 ha of forests have been FSC certified, and another 17,00,000 ha will undergo FSC-certification in the next 5 years. GSEZ is also working closely with factories operating in the zone for FSC certification. To date,12 factories are FSC certified, and the remaining are in various stages of development concerning FSC certification. Gabon Nature Panels focuses on collecting the maximum amount of wood residues from the FSC-certified factories to ensure that sustainability is at the core of Gabon Nature Panels products.