The food we eat causes one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, as forests are cleared at an ever-growing rate to make way for new cattle pastures, soy fields, cocoa farms and oil palm plantations. Driven by new legislation to protect forests and calls to cut emissions, companies are racing to trace where their food products come from. My team’s new research warns, however, that we should not treat traceability as a silver bullet – companies must think bigger to tackle deforestation. Businesses and governments are ramping up efforts to address emissions and deforestation in their supply chains. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is, for example, developing a protocol to help companies calculate their carbon footprint. The European Union, UK and USA have passed, or are in the process of passing, due-diligence legislation which places a duty on companies to prove that imported products do not come from recently deforested land. The EU legislation comes into effect at the end of 2024, prompting a rush to trace the origin of goods such as beef, soy or palm oil imported into the world’s third-largest market. Symptom of a wider problem Unfortunately, the scale at which these initiatives are being implemented limits their effectiveness in tackling deforestation. Both the emissions protocol and due-diligence legislation prioritize monitoring at the ‘plot’ or ‘land-management unit.’ These efforts therefore limit their attention to the smoking gun: the agricultural product which is directly expanding into forest. But deforestation is driven by dynamic agricultural markets and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Traceability is no silver bullet for reducing deforestation (commentary) appeared first on EnviroLink Network.