Certified wood and paper products come from responsibly managed forests – as defined by a particular standard. With third-party forest certification, an independent standards setting organization (SSO) develops standards for good forest management, and independent auditing companies issue certificates to forest operations that comply with those standards.

Forest certification programs typically require that forest management practices conform to existing laws. Other basic requirements or characteristics of forest certification programs include:

Basic requirements of credible forest certification programs include:

ISO members rejected a proposal for a forestry management system as requirements standard, with a consensus that a management system for certification would not be effective. Instead ISO members voted for a chain of custody of wood and wood-based products with ISO 38200 published in 2018. Without a single international standard for forestry management certification, there are a proliferation of private standards, with more than 50 scheme owners offering certification programs worldwide addressing the many types of forests and tenures around the world. The two largest international forest certification programs are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). The Forest Stewardship Council's Policy on Conversion states that land areas converted from natural forests to round wood production after November 1994 are ineligible for Forest Stewardship Council certification.

The PEFC is the largest certification framework in terms of forest area, with approximately two-thirds of the total certified area. The FSC program is the fastest growing. In 2021, PEFC issued a position statement defending their use of private standards in response to the Destruction: Certified report from Greenpeace.

Third-party forest certification was pioneered in the early 1990s by the FSC, a collaboration between environmental NGOs, forest product companies and social interests. Competing systems quickly emerged throughout the world. Some commentators, including Jared Diamond, have suggested that many competing private standards were set up by logging companies specifically aiming to confuse consumers with less rigorously enforced but similarly named competing standards.

There are two varieties of forest certification:

In the United States and Canada, there are a number of forest certification programs. Three of these programs are endorsed by the PEFC. They are the American Tree Farm System (ATFS), the Canadian Standards Association's Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) Standard and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). ATFS is applicable only in the United States; the Canadian Standards Association SFM Standard is applicable only in Canada. SFI is applicable to both the United States and Canada. SFI is the world's largest single forest certification standard by area. The FSC, program is applied throughout North America.