Comment: We should use Lula's election and COP27 to ramp up action to save forests

November 10 - It’s clear there’s no climate positive future without a forest positive one. When forests are healthy, thriving and – most importantly – growing, they absorb more carbon dioxide than they release.

So when we destroy and damage forests, we wipe out critical natural allies in our fight against catastrophic global temperature rise. That’s why there’s no pathway to keeping temperature rise below the 1.5 degrees Celsius Paris Agreement target without halting forest loss.

The continued pace of forest destruction is alarming, to put it mildly. To point to just one recent data-set, September saw 36,850 fire alerts in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. That made it the worst month in a decade for fires in this vital carbon sink.

The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil has ramped up the conversation around deforestation. We must harness this to accelerate action as global leaders and the world’s most influential businesses gather in Egypt for COP27, and in Canada for COP15 later this year.

We have to find solutions. Specifically, solutions involving four commodities found in countless consumer products and consumer goods supply chains.

One of these commodities is palm oil, the world’s most-traded vegetable oil. Another is soy, for which global demand has increased nearly 13-fold in the past 50 years. Then there’s beef, a primary driver of tropical deforestation due to cattle ranching. And last, but by no means least, is paper, pulp and fibre-based packaging (PPP), representing 33-40% of the wood traded globally.

Across the world, the production of these four commodities have been huge agents of forest destruction, degradation and conversion. To see how companies can change that – and how some of them are already driving significant change – just look at some of the numbers posted last month in The Consumer Goods Forum’s Forest Positive Coalition annual report, opens new tab.

Two years on from its formation, this coalition of 21 consumer goods manufacturers and retailers, with a combined market value of more than $2 trillion, has reported impressive progress against a set of ambitious metrics for forest-positive performance.

These key performance indicators (KPIs) are a critical part of increasing transparency and measuring progress and impact throughout the palm oil, soy, beef and PPP value chains – towards making commodity-driven deforestation, forest degradation and conversion practices of the past.

On average, the coalition is collectively reporting on 62% of these KPIs, a clear indication of the very different stages consumer goods companies are at in their efforts to track, trace and remove deforestation from their commodity supply chains.

International supply chains can be incredibly long and complex, leaving companies facing difficulties in ensuring all their suppliers’ processes are visible and forest-positive. And organisations with multiple commodities can be much slower in making progress.

The disruption to supply chains caused by the pandemic also drove companies to further increase their number of suppliers, to provide greater security and resilience in the flow of raw commodities and finished goods.

It’s a trend that’s not set to diminish anytime soon, as businesses contend with everything from energy shocks caused by the conflict in Ukraine, to the threat of further insecurities like those created by Indonesia’s temporary ban on exporting palm oil earlier this year.

With so many fires burning, how can all companies get up to the same forest positive pace? How do we keep driving progress forward?

Now more than ever, global supply chains need to be resilient. Every political, economic, social and environmental shock reinforces this fact. Here lies an opportunity.

Resilience requires more networking. More collaboration. More engagement. And the times demand we do it faster.

All this can work hard towards saving forests faster, too – if companies respond by working directly and urgently with manufacturers and suppliers on the ground to increase the number of forest positive suppliers.

To give you one example, in Brazil the Forest Positive Coalition’s Beef Working Group is currently focusing on addressing lack of transparency in the Brazilian beef supply chain. It’s about complementing, supporting and increasing the use of best practices that already exist in Brazil, thanks to the efforts of progressive local cattle farmers, meatpackers and geo-monitoring companies. This work has the potential to help more companies improve the tracking and traceability of their beef supply chains by leaps and bounds.

Initiatives like this matter on a long-term existential level. They also help companies respond to consumers, who increasingly want to see sustainability credentials from brands and companies. Companies recognize this – one study indicated more than half of chief supply chain officers surveyed would be willing to sacrifice an average 5% of company profit, opens new tab if it meant their supply chains became more sustainable.

In a landscape that’s saturated with schemes that promise to reform supply chains and stop deforestation, it will also help speed progress if companies commit to the same roadmap and metrics. Confidence that all involved are adhering to the same forest-positive practices will be another bolster to sustainable supply chains, and hence supply chain security, amid shocks to the system.

That’s why I hope more companies will join us in this journey, so we can work together to drive positive impact. It’s on all of us, and every company, to keep going. The future of our planet depends on it.