FSC Connect - Public Certificate Search

It is the Forest Stewardship Council's public ledger of its own certifications - the authoritative record of which organizations hold FSC certificates and trademark licences, maintained by the certifying scheme itself rather than assembled from secondary sources. Five record families sit behind one search surface: Certificates (CFM, COC, CW/FM, FM and FM/COC combinations covering forests and the firms handling fibre out of them), FM Evaluations (recent and upcoming forest management assessments), Project certificates (one-off builds certified individually) and Promotional Licence Holders (firms licensed to use the FSC trademark under F000nnn-format codes).

The scale is legible in the registry's own filter facets, read during the August 2026 research pass: holders across 165 countries and areas, 65 accredited certification bodies issuing and maintaining certificates, 40 product-type categories in the N/P/W series (rough wood, solid wood, panels, pulp, paper and non-timber forest products) and a 1,037-entry tree species taxonomy for forest management scope. Within Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 industries this record scores 6/10 and anchors the certification corner of the seventeen-dataset forest-products set - the layer you reach for when a supplier's sustainability claim needs a yes-or-no answer with a certificate code behind it. Get a sample of this dataset cut to the countries and product families you buy from.

One record per certificate or licence, readable as a profile card rather than a measurement row. Representative records built strictly from the registry's verified vocabularies:

record family : Certificates
cert type     : COC               # chain of custody
status        : Valid
role          : Certificate holder
body          : APCER             # one of 65 accredited bodies
country       : Portugal
products      : P1 Pulp · P2 Paper

record family : Certificates
cert type     : FM                # forest management
status        : Valid
species       : Pinus radiata     # from the 1,037-entry taxonomy
raw materials : W1 Rough wood · W5 Solid wood
role          : Certificate holder + Site

record family : Promotional Licence Holders
licence code  : F000nnn           # trademark licence series
status        : Valid

record family : Certificates
cert type     : FM/COC
status        : Terminated and blocked   # one of five states

Read the second and fourth blocks against each other and you have the dataset's whole personality: the same ten-field description covers a living forest-management certificate with species-level scope and a corpse marked Terminated and blocked. That breadth of status vocabulary is the point - most supplier lists only bother recording who is certified today, while the registry distinguishes valid from suspended, suspended-but-blocked from plain suspended, and terminated from terminated-with-prejudice, which is exactly the nuance a due-diligence screen wants before a contract is signed.

Ten documented fields define every record, and each one doubles as a filter, which is what makes the slice behave like a database instead of a directory. Identity rides on the certificate code, the F000nnn licence code and the organization's registered and local names. State is the five-value status vocabulary plus the role marker separating the certificate holder from individual sites within group certificates. Classification is where the analytical leverage lives: certificate type (five FM/COC combinations), issuing certification body (65 of them), country (165 values), product type (40 categories across the non-timber, pulp-and-paper and wood series) and tree species resolved to scientific binomials.

Because every classification field ships with its published value list, joins need no fuzzy matching - a Portuguese pulp mill and a Chilean radiata-pine plantation parse into identical columns. Five further element groups fold under additional fields on request: raw-material product codes, the regulatory-module and ecosystem-service facets, sales-activity status, group-member rosters with site addresses, and associated-document references. Name the ones your screening logic needs when you request a sample.

Geography - global by construction, with certificate holders spread across 165 countries and areas. Certification follows fibre, so the map concentrates where the supply chain concentrates: Europe's panel and pulp belt, North America, Brazil and Chile's plantations, Southeast Asia's processing hubs - all under one key rather than one national register apiece.

Temporal - the registry is a current-state dataset: one live record per certificate or licence reflecting its standing now. Past status transitions are not retained publicly, so there is no built-in archive of when a certificate lapsed or came back. That is a property to plan around rather than lament - teams who need status dynamics capture periodic snapshots and assemble the timeline themselves, and a delivered feed makes that a scheduling decision instead of a research project.

Granularity - one record per certificate or licence, expandable downward: a single holder can decompose into sites (via the role field) and into certified product lines (via the product-type and raw-material codes). There is no aggregation wall between you and the operating unit - the certificate, not a national total, is the row, which is what lets procurement screens and market maps count the same things the auditors count.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Name the countries, certificate types, product families or certification bodies when you request the sample - the whole registry, or a slice cut to your supply chain's footprint. The sample arrives with the complete field dictionary and value lists attached, so status filters and product-category joins work on day one; the ongoing feed lands on whatever cadence your monitoring needs, which is how the missing status history gets rebuilt: as accumulated vintages in your own tables rather than as a promise someone else didn't keep.

• Supplier due diligence and ESG screening - verify that a supplier's FSC claim resolves to a live certificate with matching product scope before the claim reaches packaging or a press release. The workflow pattern sits on our supply-chain mapping page.
• Sales and growth prospecting - certificate holders are companies with demonstrated compliance budgets and export exposure; the registry is a pre-qualified account list with country, product category and certification body attached. See sales growth teams.
• Market sizing and competitive intelligence - counting certifications by country, product family and issuing body turns 'the certified market' from an adjective into a denominator, and reveals which certification bodies dominate which segments. Sketched further on market sizing and competitor tracking.
• Risk and compliance monitoring - the five-value status vocabulary catches suspensions early; a terminated-with-prejudice flag on a counterparty is worth knowing before renewal negotiations, not after. Related work lives on credit risk screening.
• Investigations and citation-grade research - journalists and academics audit green claims against the scheme's own record rather than a company's marketing PDF, with the certificate code as the citation. See citation-grade research.

Sales & growth teams get a compliance-qualified prospect universe - every row a firm that has already paid an auditor - see sales growth teams use cases. Market researchers & consultants get the certified-supply denominator behind wood-products market maps, countable by country, product family and certification body - see market researchers use cases. Competitive intelligence & product teams see which rivals hold which scopes at which sites. E-commerce & retail operators verify supplier status before sustainability badges go on product pages. Journalists, academics & students get citable records with certificate codes instead of unverifiable corporate claims - see journalists academics use cases. Start from the forest products data hub or the best forest products datasets ranking for where this fits among its neighbours.

Three things worth knowing upfront.

First, this is a current-state registry, not an archive. A certificate that was suspended last quarter and reinstated this morning reads Valid with no trace of the episode. If your models need status history, the fix is scheduled captures accumulating in your warehouse - tell us the cadence and the slice and the feed handles it.

Second, accuracy is delegated downward by design. Issuing certification bodies keep their entries current under the FSC-STD-20-001 framework; the council operates the platform and disclaims warranties on completeness and timeliness. In practice that means occasional lag between a real-world event and its reflection in the record - one more reason monitoring beats spot checks.

Third, counts move. Facet totals such as 165 countries, 65 bodies and 40 product categories were observed during the August 2026 research pass; certificates start and terminate continuously, so treat them as scale indicators rather than inventory commitments. Samples are scoped to named countries, product families and certificate types precisely so the numbers you receive are counted, not quoted.