Standards and guidelines for forest plantation management: A global comparative study

•We analysed 42 standards for sustainable development/sustainable forest management.•We analysed how forest plantation issues are addressed and considered.•Only 11 out of the 42 analysed standards/guidelines are plantation-specific.•In 6 standards we explored more in detail, main gaps regard ecosystem/landscape maintenance and the use of exotic species.•Improvement areas regard social aspects, carbon issues and non-wood forest products.

The increasing area covered by forest plantations creates a demand for trustworthy mechanisms to ensure they are responsibly established and managed. In the last twenty years efforts have increased to develop standards and guidelines as voluntary-based policy tools for guaranteeing sustainable forest management. However, most are focused exclusively or prevalently on natural or semi-natural forests, while only a few are specific to planted forests or plantations. Many differences can be identified among existing standards and guidelines that can be applied to planted forests and forest plantations. The paper, which main aim is to assess whether and to what extent planted forests are properly considered within the existing sets of standards/guidelines and to identify areas for improvements, is based on a series of comparative analysis. Both quantitative (number) and qualitative (quality in terms of coherency, consistency and completeness) aspects of indicators for addressing environmental, economic and social issues are considered. First, 42 standards/guidelines are classified and compared. Secondly, 3 standards for forest certification and 3 guidelines developed by international organisations are compared. Finally, a gap analysis is carried out with respect to an ad hoc “reference standard” with 386 indicators. Ball-charts, radar graphs and histograms are used to show results.