The SHC Assurance System applies smart geolocation to identify the U.S. county of origin of hardwoods where regular independent expert analysis of satellite, forest inventory and forest governance data confirms negligible deforestation and illegality risk. Suppliers are required to provide more detailed geolocation data to individual property level in those counties where a non-negligible risk is identified through SHC’s annual deforestation-risk assessment.
to ensure the number of geolocations remains manageable (1360 counties supply 99% of U.S. hardwood supply, compared to 9.5 million individual smallholders);
to avoid imposing unnecessary costs and burdens on small producers where risks are negligible;
to ensure smallholders are treated equally to large state and industry forest owners (the average area of U.S. counties supplying hardwoods is 160,000 hectares, equivalent to the area of many single state or industry forest holdings);
to allow geolocations to be checked using plant-chemistry-based provenance techniques (these techniques can, at best, identify provenance to within a 50km radius, but cannot identify the individual smallholder);
to deal with antitrust, commercial confidentiality and privacy concerns associated with provision of geolocation data on individual private landowners;
counties are in the front line of elected government, are often the most fundamental administrative division of the state and play an essential role in almost every community in the U.S, particularly in relation to land and resource-use planning;
counties are sufficiently compact to ensure a homogenous level of deforestation risk, a situation less likely at the scale of states (of which there are around 33 that produce significant quantities of hardwood).