Its success gave birth to a new era of cooking fats. Americans today consume a long, golden stream of vegetable oils: soybean, palm, safflower, sunflower, peanut, avocado, coconut, canola, olive. The plants cultivated to make these oils now cover nearly a quarter of the planet’s cropland, and demand for them is still growing. That’s not good news for the Earth. To grow oil crops, particularly palm and soybeans, farming corporations are cutting down carbon-rich forests, threatening climate goals and biodiversity.

But what if there was a cooking oil that didn’t drive deforestation? A California startup called Zero Acre Farms claims to have created just that. Zero Acre hopes its product, called Cultured Oil because it’s made by fermenting sugarcane, will shift American diets like Crisco did, but to a different end. The company says its oil requires 90% less land and accounts for 86% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than soybean oil, the most widely consumed vegetable oil in the United States.

“If we’re going to continue to satisfy our insatiable desire for oils and fats,” said Stephen del Cardayre, Zero Acre’s co-founder and chief technical officer, “we have to do it more efficiently.”

The startup’s new cooking oil is starting to gain attention. Zero Acre has raised millions of dollars from venture capital funds linked to Chipotle Mexican Grill, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and the actor Robert Downey Jr. In September, Shake Shack announced it would test Cultured Oil on its fries at two of its New York City restaurants. Grocery stores aren’t selling sleek stainless steel bottles of the oil yet, but you can buy one on Zero Acre’s website for $26.99.

Cultured Oil, which has a soft yellow hue like other oils, is made by microorganisms. Add sugarcane to a vat filled with algae, and the microscopic beings convert the sugar into oil. The result, according to Zero Acre, is a liquid that’s healthier than its counterparts because it’s low in saturated and polyunsaturated fats, the sort that have given seed oils a bad (if possibly undeserved) rap for contributing to chronic inflammation and heart disease.

This probably isn’t the first time you’ve encountered a lab creation that’s advertised with a list of impressive stats about how it will save the planet. Climate-conscious eaters have been under a barrage of new choices stemming from the proliferation of products aimed at replacing cow milk, beef, and other carbon-intensive meats. Whether it’s oat milk, plant-based burgers, or lab-grown chicken, the food sector is awash with claims of sustainability, some of which don’t hold up under scrutiny. Maybe you’ve made up your mind to eat a Beyond Burger instead of a beef one, and now you’re wondering whether to sear the novel meat in novel oil.

Grist spoke with three independent experts about how to assess green claims about new food products like Zero Acre’s oil. Each stressed that the only way is to look at something called a life cycle assessment, nicknamed LCA — the analysis that a company uses to determine the land, energy, and water use associated with its product and to compare it to other products.

If we’re going to continue to satisfy our insatiable desire for oils and fats, we have to do it more efficiently.

 

– Stephen del Cardayre, Zero Acre’s co-founder

“Without the LCA, I can’t make anything of it,” said Sarah Collier, an assistant professor and food sustainability researcher at the University of Washington.

The mere fact that a life cycle assessment has been done, even by a third party (as in the case of Zero Acre), isn’t enough to inspire confidence, experts said. That’s because these analyses can be built in a way that makes a company’s product look better than its competitors’. There are a variety of ways to grow oil crops, and different growing systems use different amounts of land and emit different amounts of greenhouse gases. In the case of Cultured Oil, the kinds of soybean farms or palm plantations that you compare against the sugarcane operations that feed Zero Acre’s microbes could lead to different conclusions.

“If you choose baselines that aren’t really equivalent, you can end up making your practice look really, really good, and you can also end up making a competitor’s practice or a legacy practice very bad,” said Mark Bomford, director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program. “If I wanted to make soy-based land look really bad, I would include the largest estimates around the worst kinds of deforestation.”

Like many companies, Zero Acre has not made its assessment public, so it’s not possible to verify independently how the boundaries of the analysis were drawn. But a spokesperson for the company did say that its comparison with soybean oil relies on data from soybean production in South America, the same region where the sugarcane used to make Zero Acre oil is grown. Del Cardayre told Grist that Zero Acre plans to publicly release its results once the company is bigger and more stable but is keeping the assessment private for now because it contains proprietary information.

“We try to be as transparent as we can,” del Cardayre said. “Our whole goal, the reason we were founded, was to make better oils and fats that were better for the planet, for the body, and for food. It’s what drives us. It’s our North Star. We have no interest in doing something that’s not doing that.”

A lot of academics are going to be skeptical because we’ve heard it before.

 

– Julie Guthman, University of California, Santa Cruz

Independent experts agreed that Zero Acre’s oil holds promise. Joseph Poore, a food sustainability researcher at the University of Oxford, said in an email that the company’s goal to minimize environmental damage and improve human health is “excellent and critical.” Vegetable oil production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and rising demand for oil crops like palm has been linked to habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. But Poore and other academics also said that it’s too early to know how much better for the environment Cultured Oil will be.

“A lot of academics are going to be skeptical because we’ve heard it before,” said Julie Guthman, a professor of social sciences who studies food systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Two years ago, Guthman co-authored a paper that investigated claims of “dematerialization” in the alternative proteins industry — referring to the idea, pushed by Silicon Valley startups, that edible protein can be made “from (nearly) nothing, drawing on abundant or mundane resources” that presumably have no environmental drawbacks.

In the paper, Guthman and her colleague Charlotte Biltekoff found that the details of how these foods get produced “are largely black-boxed, making any claims to dematerialization appear as magic.” Food-tech companies aren’t necessarily trying to keep consumers in the dark, but they feel pressure, in their quests to woo investors and reshape the world, not to divulge trade secrets. The way they represent their products, Guthman and Biltekoff wrote, obfuscates more than it reveals and makes it “difficult, if not impossible, for the public — or anyone really — to meaningfully assess the promises and their potential consequences.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food/cooking-oil-deforestation-startup-sugarcane-solution/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post What if there was a cooking oil that didn’t drive deforestation? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In early 2021, a settled Indigenous Ayoreo community living in the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay reportedly started hearing songs and shouting during the night. The singing came from an uncontacted Ayoreo tribe, who travelled close to the settlement to bring a message of struggle. From a distance, they sang of the vanishing forest they depend on and how much harder life was becoming for them.

And then they left.

The Gran Chaco is South America’s second largest forest biome and spans vast tracts of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. The subtropical region doesn’t receive the same amount of international attention as its northern neighbour, the Amazon, but it’s a vital carbon sink teeming with threatened wildlife. It’s also home to dozens of Indigenous tribes, including some of the last uncontacted tribes in South America. Fuelled by global demand for beef, leather and soy feed, millions of hectares of its forest have been cleared away for pastureland and crops in recent decades, pushing out the Ayoreo and other tribes in the region.

Activists say multinational corporations such as Cargill are historically to blame. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been pushing governments and agribusiness to do more to rid supply chains of the deforestation that is threatening the region. There is hope that some commodity traders are starting to get their act together in an effort to meet “deforestation-free” pledges.

And lawmakers are now proposing regulations in the European Union and the United States that will force companies to rid their supply chains of deforestation. But after a decade of empty promises, a dozen South American Indigenous groups have united to demand urgent protection for the region’s uncontacted tribes.

They want to see ranchers expelled from their ancestral lands.

People of the forest

While the ecological harms of widespread deforestation (such as increased carbon emissions and a loss of biodiversity) have been well documented, a recent study has provided a sense of the scale of displacement of people who depend on the forests of the Gran Chaco. An international team of researchers used satellite imagery of the region to determine that more than 5,000 (or 18% of) small homesteads that were in the area in 1985 have since disappeared and only around 2,800 new homesteads have emerged. It’s hard to determine how many of these settlements were Indigenous, but some undoubtedly were.

In the Indigenous Quechua language, “Gran Chaco” means “hunting land,” a fitting name, given the rich diversity of wildlife in the area and the hunter-gathering traditions of the tribes that live there. Agribusiness has eaten into the forest resources that these communities depend on – including wildlife for food and wood for fuel and shelter. “The people side to it is often overlooked,” says Christian Levers, an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and lead author of the study. With their ancestral territory being encroached upon, they have less space to live according to their own customs and traditions, advocates say. And with less territory, they have to work even harder not to come into contact with the ranchers in the area.

In the Paraguayan part of the Gran Chaco, the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode are fighting for formal land claims to put a halt to deforestation. The Ayoreo, together with Indigenous organizations from across South America, are now calling on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene after years of negotiating with the Paraguayan government, and are making little progress. “For years, the Paraguayan authorities have stood by and watched as the Ayoreos’ priceless forest goes up in smoke,” says Teresa Mayo, head of Survival International’s Ayoreo campaign. “Satellite images from recent decades show a truly horrifying rate of destruction. It’s now only major international pressure that can prevent the total destruction of the uncontacted Ayoreo people, and the forests they have cared for for so long.”

The coalition wants to see an end to foreign companies, such as Brazilian firm Yaguareté Porá and Argentina’s Carlos Casado, being allowed to operate on their ancestral lands. Advocates say the situation is at a tipping point.

“If the state refuses to act when we protest at the invasion of our territory, the cattle ranchers will occupy all our land, our relatives will die, and we could soon disappear too,” an Ayoreo leader, Porai Picarnerai, said in a statement.

Murky beef and soy supply chains

Soy and cattle ranches are key drivers of deforestation in many parts of South America, and the Gran Chaco is no exception. While meat companies in other parts of the world label their products as local, their livestock is often fed soy that comes from South America. From 1961 to 2014, soy production grew by more than 55 million hectares in South America. Recent investigations have called out U.K. grocers and fast food chains for selling beef and chicken raised on soy that fuels deforestation in the Gran Chaco and the Amazon. In a 2021 report, Greenpeace UK noted that “meeting the UK’s annual demand for soya requires a land area larger than Northern Ireland.”

At the heart of the problem is the lack of traceability that plagues soy and cattle supply chains in the Gran Chaco. There are often multiple layers of suppliers and middlemen between farms and larger multinational companies that make it hard to know whether products are tainted by deforestation. The largest multinational companies have pledged to get deforestation out of their supply chains, but the problem persists.

For years, the Paraguayan authorities have stood by and watched as the Ayoreos’ priceless forest goes up in smoke.

– Teresa Mayo, head of Survival International’s Ayoreo campaign

Cargill is one of the largest food companies that sources soy from the Gran Chaco. In 2019, advocacy group Mighty Earth named Cargill the “worst company in the world” for allegedly continuing to “prioritize the deforesters in its supply chains over the climate or their customers’ sustainability demands.” A 2018 Mighty Earth investigation reported that soy farmers at sites of recent deforestation in the Gran Chaco had claimed they sold their products to Cargill and Bunge. In an emailed statement, a Cargill spokesperson said that the company has committed to eliminating deforestation from its supply chains and that it “does not and will not supply soy from farmers who clear land illegally.”

But environmental advocates continue to question Cargill’s commitment to zero deforestation in its South American supply chain. In 2021, the World Wildlife Fund and Global Canopy published a “Soy Traders Scorecard” that concluded that global soy traders are failing to take meaningful action when it comes to deforestation. The scorecard ranked 22 traders. Among them, Brazil’s Amaggi ranked at the top but scored only 52.5 out of a possible 100 points. Cargill ranked second with 50.5 points. The company also scored just 17.5 points out of 33 when it came to whether it was implementing ethical supply chains that were free of deforestation.

The report found that none of the six big multinational soy traders – Amaggi, Cargill, Bunge, ADM, COFCO and Louis Dreyfus Company – had a clear cut-off date for when they would ensure their deforestation commitments in the Gran Chaco. Of those companies, France’s Louis Dreyfus Company ranked the worst on the scorecard (but sixth overall). Only nine of the 22 companies responded to the scorecard survey.

Car leather driving deforestation

The leather industry is also fuelling deforestation in this part of the world. A 2020 report by U.K.-based non-profit Earthsight, Grand Theft Chaco, linked illegal deforestation in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco, where uncontacted Ayoreo tribes live, to cattle ranchers that have sold animal hides to some of Europe’s largest tanneries. Earthsight investigators found that large car manufacturers, such as BMW and Jaguar Land Rover, were using leather in their vehicles sourced from slaughterhouses that process cows from ranchers responsible for “illegal clearances” in these forests.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Jaguar Land Rover said the company took the allegations in Earthsight’s report “extremely seriously” but didn’t find evidence of illegal deforestation in its supply chain.

A BMW spokesperson also maintained that the company’s leather supply chain “is not related to deforestation in Paraguay.” The spokesperson added that the company had taken “initial measures several years ago and began to restructure the leather supply chains.” BMW says it has been steadily reducing the amount of leather it sources from South America and by 2023 will no longer have any hides from Paraguay in its supply chain.

But in 2021, Earthsight released a follow-up report alleging that little had changed. The report said that the Paraguayan government had not taken meaningful action to prevent deforestation and that leather exports tied to deforestation continued to flow to European tanneries that supply car manufacturers. Rubens Carvalho, the head of deforestation research at Earthsight, says car manufacturers still weren’t tracing their leather all the way back to ranches, and that’s the only level of traceability that matters.

“If you don’t know the farm from which the leather is originating, it doesn’t matter if you know the tannery it’s coming from,” says Carvalho, who posed undercover as an industry investor in Earthsight’s investigation. “It’s what’s happening on the ground that matters, and that level of traceability still seems to be extremely complicated in the leather industry.”

“Traceability is needed,” he says. “Without that you’re left blind.”

What corporations can do

In 2014, more than 50 companies and dozens of governments signed the New York Declaration on Forests, a non-binding commitment to end deforestation driven by agriculture commodity production by 2020. That commitment obviously didn’t materialize fully, as deforestation is still widespread, but some experts say that significant progress has been made in the years since the declaration. Global deforestation has slowed somewhat since the 1990s, when an estimated 16 million hectares of forest were cleared every year, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. And 141 countries pledged to stop forest loss by 2030 at COP26, last year’s UN climate summit in Glasgow. Argentina and Paraguay signed the declaration, but Bolivia did not.

Melissa Brito, an agricultural economist with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), says that companies have also started to invest in understanding their supply chains all the way down to the farm level. And advancements in monitoring technologies have made it harder for companies to make excuses.

Traceability is needed. Without that you’re left blind.

– Rubens Carvalho, the head of deforestation research at Earthsight

NGOs, such as TNC, have put together traceability systems and guidelines to give companies the tools and knowledge they need to act on their deforestation commitments. A few years ago, the NGO community that works on deforestation and supply chains came together and developed a list of recommendations called the Accountability Framework. It includes everything from a consistent definition of a forest to information about acceptable levels of traceability and reporting in supply chains. “It’s a giant recipe for how to do ethical supply chains,” says Brito.

She adds that the large multinationals that source soy and other commodities from South America are at varying stages of attaining their zero-deforestation commitments. Some are more advanced in certain regions than others, she says. In other words, they’re not all where they need to be yet, but they’re “on a journey,” she says.

Robust regulations, please

Many advocates remain unconvinced that corporations will do what’s necessary to purge deforestation from their supply chains without tough regulations. There has been a push for legally binding regulations in countries where companies are headquartered that would force them to trace commodities to their point of origin to make sure they aren’t tainted by deforestation.
“We have seen over the decades that voluntary schemes do not work. There have been a number of voluntary schemes in place for a number of years, and over the last 20 years all we’ve seen is a rise in deforestation,” Carvalho says.

In February, the European Commission introduced a proposal that would set “mandatory due diligence rules for companies which want to place these commodities on the EU market with the aim to ensure that only deforestation-free and legal products are allowed on the EU market.” Last year, the British government passed legislation to address “illegal deforestation” in corporations’ supply chains but failed to take on legal deforestation. And in the United States, a group of lawmakers introduced a bill called the FOREST Act, which would restrict products linked to illegal deforestation. The bill was sponsored by two Democrats and one Republican in October, but it’s unclear if Congress will pass it.

Whatever government remedies are applied to deforestation, advocates say they need to happen quickly to save the Gran Chaco and the Indigenous communities that live there.

“Time is running out, and the Chaco is vanishing fast,” Carvalho says.

The post How soy, beef and leather supply chains are threatening one of South America’s last forest frontiers appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On January 1, 2019, Jair Bolsonaro began his tenure as the president of Brazil. In Bolsonaro’s first eight months in office, his administration has had a profound impact on Brazil’s forests and its Indigenous population, and critics now link Bolsonaro’s anti-environment policies and rhetoric with the wildfires affecting Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. But Bolsonaro is not the only one fuelling the fire as agro-businesses expand into forested regions, driven by global demand for Brazilian commodities. Consumer goods like beef and soy are largely to blame for the need to clear land. Thus, food producers sourcing ingredients in Brazil, financial industries and trading governments all have a role in addressing deforestation and human rights issues in Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s destructive policies

Less than a year in power, Bolsonaro’s impact on the environment and Indigenous peoples has been far-reaching. Deforestation levels in Brazil between July 1 and 22 of this year alone were 111% higher than they were in all of 2018. Over 120 pesticides were authorized in 2019 to date, some of which have been classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as “dangerous” or “extremely dangerous” for humans and the environment. All this occurred under the auspices of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, whose powers have increased at the expense of the Ministry of Environment. The MoE and its anti-deforestation agency, Ibama, have suffered drastic budget cuts since Bolsonaro came into power, lessening their ability to identify and penalize instances of illegal deforestation. The new Minister of Environment, Ricardo Salles, dismissed environmental fines as ‘ideological’, leading civil servants in the Ministry to distance themselves from the minister in an open letter in April.

The Bolsonaro administration has also proposed transferring the protection of Indigenous rights to the Ministry of Agriculture again after congress voted against the initial proposal. Because of his strong ties to Brazil’s agribusiness, many are concerned the Minister of Agriculture will further subordinate Indigenous land rights to agricultural industry interests. During his campaign, Bolsonaro swore “to not demarcate another centimetre of Indigenous land” for protected status. Roughly 12% of Brazil’s lands are Indigenous lands, spread over 700 territories, of which about a third is waiting for official recognition.

Corporate deforestation pledges 

Bolsanaro’s reputation as “the most environmentally dangerous head of state in the world,” as The Economist recently put it, doesn’t just affect Brazil’s forests and Indigenous communities. International firms will want to keep a watchful eye on exactly how they’re doing business in Brazil. The Brazilian beef and soy industry has been singled out for fuelling many of the roughly 26,000 fires recorded in the Amazon this month, as land is typically cleared by farmers and ranchers to grow crops and raise cattle. Brazil is the largest beef exporter in the world with around 25% of the global beef market. In the last year, it has also surpassed the U,S. as the world’s largest exporter of soy (much of that soy is used as animal feed). As well, global demand for Brazil’s timber exports is contributing to the deforestation. Chances are high that firms taking advantage of less rigorous regulations may be doing so on disputed or demarcated Indigenous territories.

Despite Brazil’s regulatory rollbacks, countries and companies importing from Brazil have their own commitments on deforestation and human rights to uphold. Given the misalignment of these commitments with Brazil’s policies and practices, continuing to buy commodities from Brazil could prove to be contentious and pose reputational risks. In May 2019, several UK food retailers were named and shamed in the media for continuing to purchase products from Brazil’s JBS (the world’s largest meat processing company) despite the fact that investigations found the company was sourcing cattle from illegally deforested areas in the Amazon.

Over 50 of the world’s biggest companies (including Cargill, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Lloyds Banking Group) have pledged to halve deforestation in their supply chains by 2020 under the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests. This after a 2010 alliance on deforestation driven by the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) saw 400 international companies pledge to zero net deforestation supply chains for palm oil, soy, beef and pulp and paper by 2020. American agri-giant Cargill, one of the largest exporters of Brazilian soy, has been heavily criticized for recently announcing that it would not meet its 2010 pledge. It’s also facing a backlash for backtracking on its commitment to a soy moratorium in Brazil’s Cerrado region – known as the world’s most biodiverse savanna.

Forest-related commitments in agricultural supply chains

Being implicated in the deforestation of Brazil’s traditional Indigenous lands could also put companies at odds with their public commitments on human rights, which are aligned with the interests of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was seen as a landmark development for the OHCHR. Providing mechanisms for Indigenous peoples to provide free, prior, and informed consent for projects in the Brazilian Amazon may be a way forward for companies looking to ease current tensions. In April, an Ecuadorian court suspended government plans to auction off Indigenous Waorani territories for oil exploration stating that the government didn’t receive the tribe’s consent.

Role of the Financial Sector

Multinational corporations aren’t alone in their exposure to Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado. Banks play a central role as an intermediary between the financial markets and the consumer goods sector, including food and agricultural companies. Boycotts of Brazilian beef and byproducts overseas could lead to longer loan payback terms and negatively impact banks’ credit portfolios. Similarly, if improvements to environmental standards take priority in EU-Mercosur trade negotiations, banks operating within Brazil will be under increased exposure to ESG integration against financials risks.

Sustainalytics looked at the financing policies of 13 of the biggest domestic and foreign banks in Brazil by assets (10 domestic, 3 foreign).  Only three of the Brazilian banks (Banco do Brasil, Caixa Econômica Federal, and Itaú Unibanco Holding S.A.) have general environmental and social guidelines that mention or address deforestation, Indigenous peoples or cattle ranching practices. Notably, none of the banks in our research sample has a standalone policy addressing Indigenous peoples and rights. The three foreign banks (Barclays PLC, BNP Paribas SA, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.) had policies addressing deforestation and soft commodities (i.e., cattle ranching, timber products, soy, etc.).

In the absence of stronger environmental protections from the Brazilian government, bank financing policies can be influential in ensuring borrowers respect international norms and standards. Poor or non-existent policies can exacerbate the deforestation practices fueling Brazil’s fires.  Domestic and foreign banks operating within Brazil can manage their exposure to reputational and other ESG risks by establishing or improving social and environmental lending policies for sensitive sectors like agriculture and soft commodities.

For instance, French international banking group BNP Paribas encourages its agricultural commodities producers to have their crops or plantations certified against Round Table on Responsible Soy, Better Cotton Initiative, Bonsucro or UTZ principles and standards by 2020. It encourages cattle farmers to have their production systems certified by 2020 against the Standards for Sustainable Cattle Production Systems by the Sustainable Agriculture Network.

Banks could also work with NGOs that monitor the environmental and social impacts of deforestation and set up ESG funds that exclude poor performers with respect to deforestation practices. They could also introduce or bolster requirements for consultation with Indigenous Peoples.

Altamira, Brazil. Photo by Victor Moriyama/Greenpeace.

Call for a regulatory crackdown by Europe

While the EU has enforced legislation on illegal timber, illegal fishing and conflict minerals, there is no regulation on agricultural goods linked to deforestation. As a major trading bloc and a significant consumer of agricultural products associated with global deforestation, the EU holds some responsibility and has an opportunity to drive change and set best practice standards.

The European Commission has received numerous requests from academics and stakeholder initiatives, such as the Amsterdam Declaration, calling for regulations requiring proof that goods placed in the EU market don’t contribute to either global deforestation or human rights abuses. A 2017 motion by the European Parliament called for regulation of the EU’s footprint on the world’s forests and highlighted the need for effective protection of Indigenous peoples rights and forest-dependent communities.

We all have a role in making sure Brazil’s rainforest is safeguarded well into the future. Governments can regulate beef, soy, timber and other imports linked to deforestation. The financial sector can leverage its role and influence companies to reduce deforestation and improve relationships with Indigenous peoples. It’s also incumbent on the consumer goods industry to uphold its voluntary commitments in the face of weakened regulations and protections. Much will depend on the willingness of the actors involved, be they cattle farmers, multinationals, consumers, banks or investors, to recognize the power they hold, and to act on it.

Jean-François Obregón is a Senior Associate, Insurance, Real Estate and Asset Management Research at Sustainalytics and based in Toronto.

Jessica Grant is an Associate, Consumer Goods Research at Sustainalytics and based in Amsterdam.

Thijs Huurdeman is an Associate, Consumer Goods Research at Sustainalytics and based in Amsterdam.

A version of this story first appeared on Sustainalytics.com.

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One year from that deadline, UK-based non-profit Global Canopy had some less than laudatory news to share on the International Day of Forests, March 21. Not a single corporation is on track to deliver on their deforestation-free pledges.

There have been so many forest-saving announcements over the years it’s hard to keep track of them all. First came the big news of 2010 that 400+ companies in the Consumer Goods Forum would ensure that all their soy, palm oil, beef and pulp and paper would be zero net deforestation by 2020. Then, during a blue-sky day at a UN climate summit in September 2014, over 190 governments, companies (including Nestle, Kellogg’s and Cargill) and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration on Forests with the goal of halving the loss of natural forests by 2020, striving to end it altogether by 2030. Amidst a lack of firm climate commitments, the forest declaration – while voluntary – felt fairly concrete, it felt good, it felt doable.

And the pledges kept on coming. After years of bad press, dozens of the world’s biggest palm oil producers and traders earned praise for promising to take on the ‘zero-net deforestation by 2020’ goal. Hundreds more companies from Unilever to McDonald’s had jumped on board.

Considering at least two-thirds of tropical deforestation comes from commercial agriculture, the commitments were – and are – a big deal. At the time, the UN said meeting the New York Declaration would slash carbon pollution by between 4.5 and 8.8 billion tons every year – “about as much as the current emissions of the United States.”

But if forests keep falling, is anyone held accountable? Global Canopy’s annual Forest 500 ranking has been keeping track of the 350 most influential corporations and 150 financial institutions in forest-risk commodity supply chains (linked to palm oil, soy, cattle and timber products). It concludes that while every year the number of companies making commitments rises, there’s a serious implementation gap. According to the report, “Even companies with ambitious commitments are not putting these into practice.”

Some of the report’s main findings:

• Over 40% of the companies ranked aren’t doing anything to tackle deforestation in their supply chains when it comes to palm oil, soy, cattle, timber and pulp and paper.

• Almost 1/3 of those that made commitments didn’t include any concrete policies on implementing those commitments, including publishing direct supplier lists or monitoring/verifying compliance.

Some companies are getting with the program. At least a handful are reporting on exactly how close they are to meeting their target. In 2017, Nestle said 58% of its deforestation commitments were met. JBS (the world’s largest processor of a fresh beef and pork) reported that 99.7% of its purchases were compliant and independently audited, with maps of all of its Amazon suppliers. However, Global Canopy points out that the commitment only applies to the Amazon rainforest and not to all the areas JBS source from.

While the latest Forest 500 report does offer a bit of data on whether sectors are disclosing supplier maps (overall, disclosure rates are abysmal), we were hoping to see Global Canopy share a list of corporate leaders and laggards on this front. Transparency is, after all, the oxygen for civil society to hold companies to account. Many major apparel companies have been posting their factory supplier lists for years. If major food companies aren’t sharing their palm suppliers, soy farms or cattle ranches, let’s call them out with a megaphone.

Speaking of cattle, they’re the largest driver of tropical deforestation globally, and yet companies in cattle supply chains are least likely to have a commitment. According to the report, only 16% of companies have a forest-related commitment for the beef or leather that they produce or source.

Cattle are the largest driver of tropical deforestation, but only 16% of companies have a forest-related commitment for their beef or leather.

 

One thing’s clear: companies are pretty spotty about which commodities they’re committing to clean up. Thanks to heavy campaigning by a number of environmental organizations (and all those heart-wrenching images of orangutans losing their forest homes), companies are more likely to have stronger commitments and implementation reporting on palm oil than any other commodity. Unilever, for instance, is singled out as a leader scoring 89% on palm oil, but it only earned 48% for its overall soy commitments. (With the global spotlight on palm, tellingly, no companies disclose their soy suppliers.)

In recognition of the gap between company commitments and impacts on the ground, the Forest 500 methodology was updated in 2018 to “better distinguish between companies who have set commitments, and those that have taken the next step towards implementation.” Still, onlookers will note major discrepancies in how the the organization grades top brands compared to say other forest advocates. Global Canopy gives companies like Nestle, Mondelez and PepsiCo five out of five on their palm policies (see below), when Chain Reaction Research reported in 2018 that the same brands were buying from a top 10 deforester in Asia. Greenpeace International reported that major brands like Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever and Mondelez were sourcing from palm suppliers responsible for destroying an area of rainforest almost twice the size of Singapore in less than three years.

Global Canopy Forest 500: Palm oil leaders

Greenpeace: brand exposure to “dirty” palm oil producers

Global Canopy researcher Sarah Rogerson explains that the Forest 500 assessments only looks at commitments and reporting made publicly by the companies themselves. Says Rogerson, “This is due to the difficulty of getting standardized on-the-ground information across all of the powerbrokers that we look at,” adding “although of course company commitments and communications should always be considered alongside these reports where they are available.”

Either way, Global Canopy, Greenpeace and others agree that that industry is worryingly behind on sticking to their word. And the longer it takes corporate supply chains to catch up to their public commitments, the more natural forests it’s going to cost us.

The official 2018 progress assessment on the New York Declaration on Forests (NYFD) found that despite corporate commitments from roughly 800 companies, “the world continues to lose natural forests at an alarming rate. In the three years following the adoption of the NYDF (2014–17), the average annual rate of natural forest loss was 42 percent higher than in the previous decade.”

Yet Rogerson is still hopeful. “It’s always worth remembering that when the big commitments were made six to 10 years ago, companies didn’t know what it would take to get there. There’s been a lot of progress in terms of setting commitments and understanding how to implement those commitments.”

Nonetheless, Rogerson says there’s a huge need to put pressure on companies lagging behind. “They can’t just keep pushing the date away without some sort of backlash.” They will, she warns, “be held accountable.”

Investing in deforestation:

Investors can and should be a bigger part of holding laggards to account, says Global Canopy. “Financial institutions are even further behind in setting commitments and policies on deforestation. Of the 150 financial institutions assessed, 97 had no financing policy for any of the four key forest-risk commodities.”

 

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