Abstract
Consumer countries and blocs, including the UK and the EU, are defining legal measures to tackle deforestation linked to commodity imports, potentially requiring imported goods to comply with the relevant producer countries’ land-use laws. Nonetheless, this measure is insufficient to address global deforestation. Using Brazil’s example of a key exporter of forest-risk commodities, here we show that it has ∼3.25 Mha of natural habitat (storing ∼152.8 million tons of potential CO2 emissions) at a high risk of legal deforestation until 2025. Additionally, the country’s legal framework is going through modifications to legalize agricultural production in illegally deforested areas. What was illegal may become legal shortly. Hence, a legality criterion adopted by consumer countries is insufficient to protect forests and other ecosystems and may worsen deforestation and conversion risks by incentivizing the weakening of social-environmental protection by producer countries.
Highlights
Consumer countries and blocs, including the UK and the EU, are defining legal measures to tackle deforestation linked to commodity imports, potentially requiring imported goods to comply with the relevant producer countries’ land-use laws
Using Brazil’s example of a key exporter of forest-risk commodities, here we show that it has ~3.25 Mha of natural habitat at a high risk of legal deforestation until 2025
A legality criterion adopted by consumer countries is insufficient to protect forests and other ecosystems and may worsen deforestation and conversion risks by incentivizing the weakening of social-environmental protection by producer countries
Summary
The way we use the land to produce, trade, and consume food is directly connected to socialcri pt environmental issues like deforestation, biodiversity loss, human rights violations, climate change, and pandemics (Laroche et al 2020, Brancalion et al 2020, Curtis et al 2018). The soy-deforestation risk of this Brazilian soy, which includes deforestation and native vegetation loss in the previous five years that became soy up to 2018, was about 61.4 thousand hectares, emitting slightly over 10 million tons of CO2 (Trase 2021). About 6.3 thousand hectares of this native vegetation loss (~10%) and ~1.1 million tons of emitted CO2 (~11%) belong to the EU, including the UK These volumes refer only to 2018 soybean production, with impacts even higher in previous years (Trase 2021). Despite global climate and biodiversity crises, Brazil’s current environmental legislation us cri pt authorizes significant amounts of vegetation loss (Rajão et al 2020). This destruction is not necessary from a land-resource standpoint.
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