Hundreds of Companies Have Pledged to Help Protect Forests. Did they?


Hindsight A series by the Headway team that looks at predictions and promises from the past.


In New York, for example, when a customer snatches a Milky Way bar from a grocery store shelf, that customer becomes the last link in a long chain that may have started on a patch of land in Ghana, where a tropical forest is located recently.

About 80 percent of the trees that are razed each year in the tropics are cleared to make room for raising cocoa, soybeans, palm oil and cattle, which are raw materials for chocolate, grain, leather sofas and thousands of other products. Ten years ago, some of the world’s largest companies, such as Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Walmart, and Mars, pledge Changing their practices to help end deforestation by 2020. Some, like Nestle and Carrefour, went even further, saying they would eliminate deforestation from their supply chains entirely.

The 2020 deadline has arrived, and some companies have reported progress towards their goals. But no company could say it has eliminated deforestation from its supply chain. Didier Bergeret, director of sustainability for the Consumer Products Forum, an industry group of more than 400 retailers and manufacturers that organized the commitment, said many others haven’t even tried. And annual deforestation in the tropics, where trees store the most carbon and harbor the most biodiversity, has recently on the rise.

Many companies committed to achieving “net zero” deforestation initially assumed that the goal could be achieved by purchasing from certified sustainable vendors, said Justin Adams, director of the Tropical Forest Alliance, which helps companies meet their commitments. Looking back, Adams said it was a naive approach to a complex problem.

First, companies have to find out exactly where their goods come from. For example, Mars is one of the world’s largest users of cocoa, which it purchases from suppliers such as Cargill. But these suppliers also buy their cocoa, and the chain is run by growers, some of whom are small farmers in Ivory Coast, Ghana and elsewhere. By the end of 2020, Mars said it was able to track it. about 43 percent cocoa to certain farms

The company had luckier mapping the palm oil supply chain. When he did, he discovered that his oil had come from 1,500 palm oil mills, which the company described as “too complex to manage.” It has since reduced that number to 87. He, along with a nonprofit called the Earth Equalizer Foundation, uses satellite imagery to monitor land use on the plantations it funds to make sure they’re not cutting down forests.

Nestle reported It reported that in 2020, suppliers of palm oil, pulp, soy, sugar and meat were free from deforestation by 90 percent. The company did some monitoring in the field and by satellite, but the decision was largely based on the fact that the products came from “low-risk areas” like Europe or the United States, where deforestation is less likely for crops like soy. . The company didn’t include cocoa or coffee in its original goal, but said these crops will be part of an effort to achieve zero deforestation by 2025.

If companies can’t track the origin of a commodity, they can’t be sure it’s grown without removing trees. Like The New York Times recently documentedFarmers operating on illegally deforested land in Brazil sold at least 17,700 cattle to middlemen over three and a half years, who then sold them to giant meat packers. The original illegal farm did not appear in the supply chain documentation. All these factors make it difficult for companies to assess the success of their efforts.

Companies that are making progress on this front voluntarily are in the minority, but some are pushing for wider adoption of these standards and for governments to pass legislation that will force change across the entire industry.

Laws and public pressure have already made a difference. Brazil is now going backwards as a result of President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive development policies in the Amazon, but just a few years ago, it was hailed as a conservation success story.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon decreased between 2004 and 2012 84 percent. Brazil has put more of the forest under legal protection and hastened the enforcement of illegal logging laws. After an uproar from groups like Greenpeace in 2006, the Brazilian government also significantly reduced deforestation for soy through a voluntary moratorium with major soy buyers like Cargill.

“What Brazil has done to reduce deforestation can happen in other countries, and it has happened in Indonesia to some extent,” said David Gibbs, a research fellow at the World Resources Institute. “But these reductions in deforestation are always potentially temporary and reversible.”

“So that way,” he added, “Brazil is a story that’s both encouraging and cautionary.”

Tropical forests and peatlands in Indonesia palm oil industryIt exploded in response to biodiesel stimulus in the US and Europe. The devastating environmental damage that followed has prompted new efforts to limit the clearing and burning of forests. Indonesia’s annual deforestation rate is now the lowest in nearly 20 years. according to this Global Forest Monitoring.

This stunning comeback shows what can happen with enough motivation. But getting rid of damage is not as easy as giving it away. New trees can be planted, but it takes decades for trees to develop the “photosynthetic machinery” needed to keep carbon at high rates, said Mark Harmon, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University.

“It’s not an instantly renewable resource,” he said.

There is reason for hope, said Nadia Bishai of CDP, a nonprofit group that tracks and ranks companies that have the biggest impact on tropical deforestation. In the past, biodiversity was the main argument for conserving tropical forests. But “forests have become the center of the climate debate,” he said. And the trees’ carbon sequestration powers were motivated European union Rules aimed at curbing deforestation, along with recent commitments by leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China and the United States. end deforestation until 2030. Signatory countries are home to about 85 percent of the world’s forests, making it the most comprehensive agreement on forest protection ever.

“I think we are a little more hopeful this time,” Bishai said. “This collective action is the key to the future.”

As the companies’ 2010 commitments make clear, the oath is not a conclusion. But at least it can show the way.


progress It is an initiative of The New York Times that explores the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.

The Headway initiative is funded by donations from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a financial sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a fundraiser of Headway’s public square.




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