In May 2026, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI®) honored Domtar with its 2026 SFI Leadership in Conservation Award, presented at the SFI Annual Conference in Montréal. SFI recognized Domtar for its deep and sustained engagement with SFI’s Climate Smart Forestry Initiative, its contributions to field-level forest research and its conservation work on habitat and biodiversity alongside other certified organizations.
What Is the SFI Leadership in Conservation Award?
SFI has presented the Leadership in Conservation Award every year since 2007. It recognizes an SFI-certified organization, a team of partners or an individual for outstanding conservation achievements and innovation. SFI is an independent nonprofit that certifies responsible forest management across North America — so the award reflects an outside judgment about real work in real forests. Announcing the award, SFI’s chief conservation officer, Lauren T. Cooper, said Domtar shows “the type of leadership that is helping shape the future of conservation” in North American forests.
What Is Climate Smart Forestry?
Healthy forests are climate allies. Climate Smart Forestry starts from that idea and applies climate science to everyday forest management — adapting practices to changing conditions, storing more carbon in healthy, growing forests and building resilience against threats like wildfire and invasive species, with benefits for biodiversity along the way.
SFI launched its Climate Smart Forestry Initiative in 2024 to put those practices to work across the forests it certifies. The initiative carries out Objective 9 of the SFI 2022 Forest Management Standard, which asks certified organizations to adapt their forest management to climate change and find ways to reduce emissions. Domtar’s engagement runs deep, including field-level research: the company is a central partner in Silva21, a research program that brings scientists and forest managers together to improve the resilience of Canadian forests.
A Partnership Measured in Decades
Domtar and SFI have partnered since 2004 across forestry operations, certification, sustainability and innovation. Today, 100% of Domtar’s forest operations and most manufacturing facilities are certified to SFI standards.
Why Independent Recognition Matters
We think leadership should be verifiable. Certification means our team’s daily forest management is checked by government oversight and by independent third parties like SFI — not just by us. As Étienne Vézina, Domtar’s vice president of forestry and certification, puts it, that external validation helps the company meet certification standards and “stay at the forefront of what forestry will look like tomorrow.”
Conservation happens in partnership. We’re grateful to SFI and to the researchers, communities and partner organizations who make this work possible — and we’re not done. Read more about the award and the people behind it in our newsroom. We are the fiber for the future.
