hcvf.ru: universal tool for working with HCVs

The development of the website was supported by WWF-Russia through the WWF-IKEA Partnership on Forests with support from other sponsors and in participation with other NGOs. This website is designed as a universal tool to support the conservation and sustainable management of the most valuable forests and identify their boundaries. It has also become a useful tool for logging companies – in particular for those which are FSC certified, and for nature conservation NGOs and certification bodies as well.

High conservation value forests (HCVF) are forests which are of outstanding significance or critical importance due to their high biological, ecological, social or cultural values. Conservation of valuable forests and the wildlife in them is one of the key objectives of WWF-Russia.

To help companies to determine the boundaries and conserve the most ecologically and socially valuable forests within their leased areas, WWF-Russia together with other NGOs and environmental activists have been collecting, consolidating and digitizing the limited, disaggregated and poorly accessible information, which in many cases is scattered across paper sources, in order to create a digital database that is unprecedented in scale. At the end of 2013 the first results became available on-line at hcvf.ru.

In addition to its key objective the website also serves several additional functions. For example, it helps logging companies to increase the effectiveness of their HCVF management systems and control their suppliers as a part of their due diligence systems; it helps auditors to verify implementation of FSC requirements; it helps NGOs to establish independent monitoring of HCVF and fulfillment of logging ban agreements that they have concluded with logging companies. 

The website is considered an official source of information on HCVFs by FSC-Russia and its use by FSC-certified companies could soon become obligatory. 

Key Users of HCVF.RU:

• Logging companies which wish to know if there are any HCV sites on their leased areas or on the areas they are planning to lease;
  
• Non-commercial and state-owned organizations working on development and implementation of criteria for identification and management of HCV sites;
  
• Companies wishing to verify that they are not sourcing timber from HCV sites;
  
• Certification bodies;
  
• Financial institutions and conservation NGOs interested in up-to-date information on HCV sites in Russia.
  

The Key Sections of the HCVF.RU: