The United States has well-developed public policies, a multi-faceted governance structure with laws, regulations, enforcement, monitoring, public reporting, an accessible legal system plus an active and vocal civil society – all combining to ensure there is a robust system of forest governance. It is SHC’s belief that these risk assessments can be considered adequately conclusive and verifiable information that American hardwoods have been produced in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country of production.
The overall finding of the 33 jurisdictional risk assessments is that there is a negligible risk for all criteria and indicators across all of the States assessed. This finding is reached after extremely comprehensive and thorough independent assessment, consistently using a detailed and broad-based framework.
