Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Going deforestation-free: can it protect our forests? Hundreds of companies are going deforestation-free, but this may not be enough to stop forest clearance for palm oil, soy, pulp and paper China and India perform badly in deforestation ranking Log pile and clouds “Zero deforestation policies don’t change the fact that sourcing forest products always involves cutting trees” Photograph: Blackout Concepts/Alamy So here is the good news. Asia Pulp and Paper, one of the world’s largest pulp and paper producers, wants to go deforestation-free. For them that means stopping the conversion of natural forests, protecting high conservation value areas and good community relations, among other efforts.

The company has worked with Greenpeace and TFT to develop its zero-deforestation programme, and invited Rainforest Alliance to evaluate progress thus far. That evaluation was just released, and the news is that APP suppliers have stopped destroying natural forests.

Unfortunately, forest clearance by other third parties is still occurring. The reasons are complex, and include communities carving out space for homes and subsistence farming, overlapping tenures where natural forest might get replaced with oil palm, and selective illegal logging. Completely eliminating deforestation across APP’s huge supply chain will take time and collaboration with other players, including government.

Between the New York Declaration on Forests, the Consumer Goods Forum and individual corporate announcements, hundreds of companies are committing to sourcing commodities from suppliers that don’t destroy forests to produce them – especially beef, pulp and paper, palm oil and soy, which collectively cause about half of global deforestation.

That’s exciting because trees are critical for protecting water, soil and biodiversity, as well as creating resilience to extreme weather events and sequestering carbon. It is also a testament to constructive partnerships between corporate leaders and civil society groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, World Resources Institute and Rainforest Alliance.

But the devil is in the detail. Zero deforestation policies don’t change the fact that sourcing forest products always involves cutting trees – it’s just a question of which trees where and how. And where there is a cultivated crop, most likely there once stood forests. Without a shared definition and approach, siloed deforestation-free commitments risk simply shifting forest destruction from one company or producer area to another, confusing consumers in the process.

It’s well recognised that declaring logging off limits in a given area and throwing communities that depend on forest-based livelihoods out of work can be a recipe for illegal logging and net forest loss. Stopping deforestation requires carrots as well as sticks – deterring forest destruction as well as helping foresters and farmers make a living, protecting high-value areas and managing trees sustainably. In the case of agriculture, growing demand for food also requires sustainable intensification – in other words, producing more on less land, without unacceptable uses of chemicals and water to do so.

Take Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, which has areas of government-run “strict-protection” forest that are theoretically deforestation-free, but in practice lose an average 1% of their forest to encroachment annually. Some of those protected areas have even higher rates of illegal forest conversion than areas outside the reserve. But adjacent to these areas, also inside the reserve, are forestry concessions where communities run sustainably managed working forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Here, net deforestation rates are near zero. In other words, those logging concessions are more deforestation-free than parts of the strict-protection zones.

For North American paper company Domtar, which has been employing sustainable forest management practices for 10 years, not to mention thousands of other FSC certified companies, deforestation-free means harvesting trees in a way that protects water, soil, indigenous rights and wildlife, as well as ensuring reforestation and good community and labour relations. Currently, 20% of the paper Domtar sells is FSC certified, and it is also working to create transparency through its new Paper Trail® tool, which lets customers track environmental, social and economic impacts of their individual order.

Since agriculture causes 70% of global deforestation, and rising population and food demand increase pressure to convert forests, pursuing deforestation-free goals must also mean finding sustainable ways of increasing yields on existing cropland and grazing land without cutting forests. To feed nine billion people by mid-century, developing countries must increase food production by over 50%.

There’s evidence we can achieve that without cannibalising forests. In 2006, after Greenpeace published a report exposing deforestation from soy production in Brazil (pdf), major soy producers agreed to a moratorium on forest clearing. A new study confirms that since then, deforestation from soy fell to near zero, while soy production still doubled.

For now, deforestation-free can mean anything from stopping conversion of natural forests to active stewardship of conserved forests to intensifying agricultural yields sustainably. To really stop deforestation, we need to get on the same page. Commodity production and supply chains should respect common, key criteria, starting with no conversion of natural forests. But they should also extend further: protecting non-forest ecosystems, preventing severe pollution or over-exploitation of water, upholding community and worker rights, and progressively improving farmers’ productivity, efficiency and livelihood benefits.

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