Why Brazilian companies are certifying their forests?

The paper examines the two forest certification schemes in Brazil, the Brazilian Program of Forest Certification (Cerflor) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), from the private sector perspective. The main focus is to test the relevance of three mechanisms—market, learning, and signaling—suggested by Overdevest and Rickenbach (2006), to explain forest certification adoption by Brazilian companies. Furthermore, companies' familiarity with certification systems, external influences on pursuing forest certification, and companies' intention to recertify their forests are investigated. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) suggests that signaling and learning mechanisms lead to better and more transparent forest management, explaining the movement towards certification, but market incentives do not play an important role in the adoption of forest certification. An importance and performance analysis (IPA) demonstrates that companies do not see any return in terms of a better price for certified products; however, certificate holders indicated overall high satisfaction with market access. Interestingly, a high performance was found for non-economic benefits such as public confidence, improvement of forest management and practices, improvement of management systems and performance, self-discovery of non-conformance, and better public, landowner, and supplier communication. International consumers and shareholders were considered the most important groups influencing companies to seek certification and FSC was reported to be the most familiar scheme. Generally, companies were pleased with certification and indicated their intention to recertify.