Abstract
Abstract Zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs) are voluntary initiatives where companies or countries pledge to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains. These commitments offer much promise for sustainable commodity production, but are undermined by a lack of transparency about their coverage and impacts. Here, using state-of-the-art supply chain data, we introduce an approach to evaluate the impact of ZDCs, linking traders and international markets to commodity-associated deforestation in the sub-national jurisdictions from which they source. We focus on the Brazilian soy sector, where we find that ZDC coverage is increasing, but under-represents the Cerrado biome where most soy-associated deforestation currently takes place. Though soy-associated deforestation declined in the Amazon after the introduction of the Soy Moratorium, we observe no change in the exposure of companies or countries adopting ZDCs to soy-associated deforestation in the Cerrado. We further assess the formulation and implementation of these ZDCs and identify several systematic weaknesses which must be addressed to increase the likelihood that they achieve meaningful reductions in deforestation in future. As the 2020 deadline for several of these commitments approaches, our approach can provide independent monitoring of progress toward the goal of ending commodity-associated deforestation.
Highlights
More than 150 countries and multinational companies have made public zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs)—commitments to eliminate deforestation from the production of commodities (Donofrio et al 2017)
By combining official per-shipment trade records with comprehensive asset ownership registries, sanitary inspection records, sub-national commodity production statistics and remote sensing data on agricultural activities and land use change, we quantify the commodity-associated deforestation occurring in the subnational jurisdictions from which different actors sourced soy between 2006 and 2017 (Godar et al 2016). We thereby estimate their ‘deforestation risk’—the amount of deforestation associated with their sourcing, year-on-year, and how this has changed since individual actors have made Zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs). We demonstrate this approach for ZDCs made by soy traders operating in Brazil and by countries sourcing soy from Brazil
We identified ten ZDCs applying to the Brazilian soy sector
Summary
More than 150 countries and multinational companies have made public zero deforestation commitments (ZDCs)—commitments to eliminate deforestation from the production of commodities (Donofrio et al 2017). These include multilateral commitments such as the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), signed in 2014 by a collection of companies, NGOs, indigenous peoples, and national and sub-national governments; the Amsterdam declarations, signed by six European countries in 2015 2017); and a host of unilateral commitments made by individual companies If successfully implemented, these commitments offer a powerful lever for reducing deforestation and associated biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions. Most ZDCs lack a clear blueprint for their implementation, monitoring, or progress reporting (Donofrio et al 2017, Rogerson 2019)
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