For over twenty years, the CMFN has been a pioneer in addressing environmental and community related issues through a multi-stakeholder framework, to promote a sustainable forest industry. Applying its skills and experience developed over two decades, the CMFN can help support RRM initiatives through program delivery, developing and promoting tools and offering advice and expertise to various stakeholders in a suite of natural resource sectors.
The Strength of a Network
The strength of the CMFN is our network. With over 500 partners across Canada, from the boots on the ground to the national office, each partner offers unique experience and perspectives to discussions and decision-making. Working together with mutual respect, trusted partnerships have developed, as well as credibility and a strong reputation that can be brought to new initiatives.
This requires the input for not only economic considerations, but also local community values and needs that are integrated into planning and decision-making. The CMFN’s platform of engagement allows for the dissemination of risk across partners, allowing for the opportunity to build innovation and try new ideas that any one organization, company, or association may not have the ability to try on their own, while having the knowledge and expertise of the broad base of partners to support new initiatives.
The CMFN, as a regional representative to the International Model Forest Network, has the ability to build on this global collection of expertise and knowledge sharing capacity that can be scaled from the local to the national to the international and vice versa. This allows knowledge development and information transfer between science, policy, and practice at various scopes of interest and across disciplines.
The network of skills and experience that the CMFN has cultivated over the past twenty years, can be applied to a spectrum of Canada’s natural resource sectors. At the local and regional levels the CMFN can facilitate meetings, engage stakeholders, manage projects, educate and train as well as raise public awareness. Furthermore, the CMFN can share and transfer innovative business practices across Canada and the globe, while also drawing on ideas and expertise from elsewhere to meet local needs.
Experience & Expertise
The CMFN was created to act as a neutral broker between government, industry and communities to help develop a sustainable Canadian forest sector and improve public perceptions of the industry. Twenty years ago “logger’s choice”, or selective high grading, was the most popular harvesting practice. There was no chain of custody certification or standards of sustainable practice. At the time, the forest sector was largely regarded as an extractive industry, starkly different from the sustainably managed sector we see in 2013.
Today, similar issues are arising in the perceptions and activities of oil & gas and mining, with protests across the globe against Canadian mining firms and activists in the US and Canada on a range of issues. Industry’s challenge is addressing these concerns, developing and implementing best practices that consider social, economic, and environmental considerations, and then taking steps to change these negative public perceptions. The CMFN has a successful track record in supporting and helping to create new best practices and engaging divergent interests in the forest sector. Its expertise crafted by its broad partnerships base, with project experience from facilitation, education, and outreach, to technical, research and resource management to address relevant and high level challenges. These skills and experience can be transferred in a way that can help ignite, as well as provide guidance and support to this change in other Canadian natural resource sectors.
