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Global Deforestation

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Abstract: This paper analyses the potential implications of the proposed European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the recently adopted United Kingdom (UK) legislation on deforestation-free supply chains (henceforth ‘the legislation’) for different stakeholders in Brazil. These regulations intend to address global commodity-driven deforestation and forest degradation by ensuring that targeted commodities and products placed on (or exported from) markets are of minimal risk of being associated with - in the EU - deforestation and forest degradation or - in the UK - illegal deforestation. The paper examines potential compliance readiness in cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soybean and tropical timber supply chains in Brazil, indicating specific challenges that may arise. Through the construction of a “Compliance Likelihood Index”, our research provides comparable indications to policymakers on sectors and stakeholders that may need stronger support to meet the requirements, in order to maintain Brazil's access to EU and UK markets. The paper indicates that coffee is the sector with the highest level of incentivization and smallest hurdles for compliance, while the cattle sector may face stronger challenges to rapidly adjust its production system towards a deforestation-free value chain and prove compliance. Results of our analysis also highlight the need for collaboration between the EU/UK and Brazil in order to promote alignment between domestic and demand-side legislations so that they are mutually reinforcing. Results of this exercise, which has a focus on the producer-country view of demand-side legislation, will contribute to discussions on the merits of different approaches to strengthen the governance of deforestation-risk commodity trade. Brazil's coffee sector may currently have the greatest likelihood of ready compliance. Cattle may be the sector to which the regulations may pose the greatest challenges. The EU and UK should focus on providing financial means and technical assistance for smallholders. The EU and UK legislation will need to be accompanied by domestic policies and regulations in Brazil.

Abstract: Les événements climatiques extrêmes, en particulier les sécheresses, ont des effets très importants sur les populations des pays du Sud, notamment au sein des secteurs agricoles et de l'élevage : baisse des rendements, mortalité accrue du bétail, pertes de services écosystémiques…

Abstract: Im vorliegenden Artikel möchte ich zum einen die Frage beantworten, was neu an den Konflikten der letzten Jahre in der brasilianischen Amazonasregion um Abholzung und Landraub ist. Zum anderen möchte ich zeigen, dass das Konzept der Ressourcen-Frontier hilfreich zum Verständnis dieser aktuellen Dynamiken und gesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen ist. Jason Moores Interpretation der Ressourcen-Frontier ist dafür ein wichtiger Ausgangspunkt, denn er verbindet darin die historische Perspektive der Weltsystemanalyse mit einer Verflechtungsperspektive auf die Ausweitung kapitalistischer Warenbeziehungen. Doch obwohl Moore die Frontier als gesellschaftlich umkämpft konzeptualisiert, gibt er wenige Anhaltspunkte, wie diese gesellschaftlichen Auseinandersetzungen untersucht werden könnten. Eine stärkere Untersuchung der Rolle des Staates und der Akteur*innen auf der lokalen und nationalstaatlichen Ebene ist aber notwendig, um sowohl die gesellschaftlichen Triebkräfte der Frontiers, aber auch ihre gesellschaftliche Einhegung verstehen zu können. Deshalb werde ich in diesem Artikel den Frontier-Ansatz mit akteurszentrierten Interpretationen erweitern und auf die Konflikte um die Kontrolle der Landnutzung anwenden. Ich werde herausarbeiten, dass es den sozialen Bewegungen und ihren Verbündeten ab den 1980er Jahren gelang, Landraub und Abholzung über die Einrichtung von Schutzgebieten und kollektiven Landrechten einzudämmen. Neu an den Abholzungs- und Landraubdynamiken der letzten vier bis sechs Jahre ist, dass diese errungenen Landrechte erneut unter den Druck von Landspekulation, Bergbau oder Viehweiden geraten sind. Zum Schluss werden die Herausforderungen für den Wald- und Klimaschutz vor dem Hintergrund der Präsidentschaftswahl 2022 diskutiert.

Abstract: This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating science and technology studies (STS), especially the variant based on actor–network theory (ANT), into fields of human geography with a critical research tradition. Drawing on the experiences of political ecology and empirical research on carbon markets, it uses the example of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) to show how the turn towards such STS impacts has changed the “framing” of REDD+: from analysing REDD+ as an example of the “neoliberalization of nature” and a focus on the impacts on human forest users to detailed accounts of infrastructures and practices of making markets. Discussing the consequences of these observations and different proposals brought forward to combine ANT with political ecology, the paper argues for a conscious and reflective use of ANT-inspired STS approaches to benefit from the additional insights this approach allows while keeping the critical potential of geography alive.

Abstract: La baisse inattendue de la déforestation au Brésil en 2022 a mis en lumière la complexité des phénomènes de déboisement et la difficulté de la plupart des observateurs à se repérer au milieu de statistiques et de bases de données spatiales reposant sur des méthodologies différentes et appréciant de manière hétérogène les différents types d’atteintes à l’environnement. Dans ce contexte, cet article s’attache à replacer les chiffres récents dans un contexte plus large tant sur le plan spatial (en étendant le regard à l’ensemble de l’Amazonie, au-delà du Brésil) que sur le plan temporel (en regardant le phénomène sur plusieurs décennies) et sur le plan des approches (en présentant plusieurs sources de données). Pour y parvenir nous présentons dans un premier temps les principales données disponibles sur la déforestation, en distinguant leurs caractéristiques et en rappelant la complexité écologique et géographique sous-jacente à l’Amazonie, qui rend possible des approches différentes, dont les résultats peuvent être divergents en apparence. Dans un second temps, nous décrivons les oscillations de la déforestation depuis une trentaine d’années, en nous intéressant d’abord à l’ensemble du bassin amazonien (ou pan-Amazonie) avant de nous focaliser sur l’Amazonie brésilienne. Dans une troisième partie et afin de proposer un panorama complet sur la question, nous évoquons les causes de la déforestation, les principales politiques des États de la région pour y faire face et les conséquences du déboisement à l’échelle locale, régionale et globale.

 

Abstract: Commitments to curb illegal logging and deforestation have proliferated in recent years with the increase of global trade in tropical timber and wood products. While they reflect international sustainability demands, the employed mechanisms to assure timber legality verification may not reflect conditions faced by local private sector actors. Facing rapid forest loss and limited foreign market access, government of Myanmar started reforming its forest policy to include a system of timber legality verification. Drawing on policy analysis and mixed-methods field research, we evaluate the feasibility of the policy reform to achieve economic and environmental upgrading in the timber value chain. Our findings question the transformative capacity of this policy reform. Not only that it failed to meet its sustainability goals, it has also created favourable conditions for a race to the bottom and concentration in the timber value chain. Economic and environmental upgrading take place at the expense of private smallholders who are expected to address a range of obstacles, including limited access to inputs, quality downgrading, and increased operational costs, which hamper their performance. To prevent socio-environmental losses, forest-sector regulatory reforms should be particularly mindful of these challenges in the midstream segment of the value chain.

Abstract: The business models of tropical timber production have long been configured around illegal practices that cause environmental degradation and hinder socioeconomic progress in the Global South. However, the global corporations trading timber often point to regulatory governance weaknesses in the jurisdictions where they source timber as hindering efforts to address illegalities in their supply chains. In an innovative response, the European Union (EU) combines mandatory due diligence for timber imports – the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) – with EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership trade Agreements (VPAs) that offer finance, technology transfer, and capacity building to support domestic regulation in timber exporting countries. Through process tracing, we assess the extent to which the EU’s efforts have been effective in reforming domestic environmental governance to reduce illegal logging in Cameroon and Ghana. This allows for understanding the potential of external Europeanization, a theoretical approach explaining how and why countries (and the businesses they regulate) outside of the EU might adapt their domestic governance institutions and processes to EU rules and norms. As the EU considers similar approaches to regulate forest-related illegalities and deforestation in global agricultural supply chains, it is important to take stock of past and on-going policy efforts. We find that the causal mechanisms embedded in FLEGT have lost their transformative potential due to unfinished domestic reforms, the technocracy of supply chain traceability systems, and market leakage. Our findings suggest the VPA deliberations underpinning supply-side efforts have not shifted the power balance but rather distracted from the reality that there will be winners and losers as the countries shift toward a more transparent and accountable political economy.

Abstract: The increased availability of remote sensing products and new legislative agen-das are driving a growing focus on farm-level traceability and monitoring to tackle commodity-driven deforestation. Here, we use data on land use change in Brazil (1985–2021) from Mapbiomas to demonstrate how analyses of the drivers of deforestation are sensitive to the scale of analysis: while pixel- or property-level analyses identify proximate drivers of deforestation, analyses at larger scales(subnational regions or countries) capture more complex land use dynamics, including indirect land use change. We argue that initiatives which seek to monitor and address commodity-driven deforestation—such as the European Union’s deforestation due-diligence regulation and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol—must be conscient of these wider land use dynamics. Only by measuring progress and defining success at multiple scales can initiatives for sustainable commodity sourcing create the right mix of incentives for addressing deforestation.

Abstract: Forest fires are becoming a more significant problem in Central Europe, but their danger is not as high as that in Southern Europe. The exception, however, is forest fires occurring in disturbed areas (windthrow and bark beetle outbreak areas), which are comparable in severity and danger to the most serious forest fires. In this study, we describe the current situation in Central European countries in terms of fire protection for disturbed areas in managed forests and forest stands left to spontaneously develop (secondary succession). If a country has regulations and strategies in this area, they are often only published in the local language. In this review, we combine information from all Central European countries and summarize it in a unified international language, provide an opportunity for local authorities to express their own experiences, and integrate data from worldwide scientific research. Thus, this paper may be considered a universal guide for managing fire protection and preparedness in disturbed areas and can serve as a reference for the establishment of strict legislative rules at the state level. These laws must be obligatory for all stakeholders in individual countries. The motivation for this study was two large forest fires in an area left to spontaneously develop in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park in the Czech Republic and Harz Mountains in Germany in the summer of 2022. These incidents revealed that fire prevention legislation was inadequate or nonexistent in these areas. The strategy of the European Union is to increase the size of protected areas and spontaneous development areas. Therefore, we consider it necessary to provide governments with relevant information on this topic to create conditions for better management of these destructive events.

Abstract: To promote legal imports of timber and timber products, some countries, such as the United States, Australia, the Republic of Korea, and members of the European Union (EU), have adopted timber trade regulations. The implementation of these regulations is the result of the increase in illegal logging and its negative impact on the environment, biodiversity, and climate change. These regulations play an important role in international trade and are part of an effort to combat illegal logging and its consequences, such as deforestation. This study analyzes the impact of the implementation of these regulations on imports of timber and timber products from timber-producing and timber-processing countries with a significant share of illegal logging over the period 1995–2019. To do so, we use a method combining the gravity approach with a matching technique such as entropy balancing. To test the robustness of our results, we estimate alternative specifications and use alternative methods such as the gravity model and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). We find that the implementation of these regulations has a negative effect on imports of timber and timber products. This reduction in imports is mainly more significant for timber and timber products such as pulp and wood furniture and can also vary according to the country implementing the regulation.

Abstract: Agricultural commodity production is a major driver of tropical deforestation and biodiversity loss. Natural rubber from Hevea brasiliensis, a valuable com-modity without viable substitutes, has recently been included in the European Union (EU) deforestation regulation that aims to halt imports of goods contain-ing embedded deforestation. Sustained growth in demand for rubber is driven by increasing tire production, caused by rising transport flows and personal car ownership. We show that average natural rubber yields remain static, meaning2.7–5.3 million ha of additional plantations could be needed by 2030 to meet demand. A systematic literature search identified 106 case studies concerning transitions to and from rubber, revealing that substantial rubber plantation area expansion since 2010 has occurred at the expense of natural forest. Eliminating deforestation from rubber supply chains requires support for millions of small-holder growers to maintain or increase production from existing plantations, without land or water degradation. Supply chain traceability efforts offer opportunities to deliver such support. While the inclusion of rubber in EU legislation is a positive step, it is critical to ensure that smallholders are not marginal-ized to avoid exacerbating poverty, and that other markets follow suit to avoid displacement of rubber-driven deforestation to unregulated markets.

Abstract: The European Union (EU) has committed to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. This requires a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and ensuring that any remaining emissions are balanced through CO2 removals. Forests play a crucial role in this plan: they are currently the main option for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and additionally, wood use can store carbon durably and help reduce fossil emissions. To stop and reverse the decline of the forest carbon sink, the EU has recently revised the regulation on land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), and set a target of − 310 Mt CO2e net removals for the LULUCF sector in 2030. In this study, we clarify the role of common concepts in forest management – net annual increment, harvest and mortality – in determining the forest sink. We then evaluate to what extent the forest sink is on track to meet the climate goals of the EU. For this assessment we use data from the latest national GHG inventories and a forest model (Carbon Budget Model). Our findings indicate that on the EU level, the recent decrease in increment and the increase in harvest and mortality are causing a rapid drop in the forest sink. Furthermore, continuing the past forest management practices is projected to further decrease the sink. Finally, we discuss options for enhancing the sinks through forest management while taking into account adaptation and resilience. Our findings show that the EU forest sink is quickly developing away from the EU climate targets. Stopping and reversing this trend requires rapid implementation of climate-smart forest management, with improved and more timely monitoring of GHG fluxes. This enhancement is crucial for tracking progress towards the EU’s climate targets, where the role of forests has become – and is expected to remain – more prominent than ever before.

Abstract: There is a new trend toward public supply chain-related laws which demand information from companies on imported products. The European Union’s (EU) Renewable Energy Directive (RED) and Timber Regulation (EUTR) exemplify this new type of law. In both cases, companies have to prevent deforestation in their supply chains. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, both among those countries with the world’s highest deforestation rates, support supply chain laws on paper, but there are serious implementation deficits in practice. Using a tripartite framework developed by Cashore and Stone, our study addresses this alleged contradiction and explains deficits inherent in the laws based on the analysis of policy documents, expert interviews and field research. We find that companies take advantage of opportunities to shift exports to less regulating countries. EU member states exercise their purchasing power too cautiously over intermediary (manufacturing) countries in the supply chain, especially China. Finally, despite possibilities of public action, sanctioning is largely left to the private sector.

Abstract: This paper analyses the belief- and interest-driven coalitional politics of the new European Union Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) by applying the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Baptist & Bootlegger Theory. Our results first show how two PRO-Regulation Coalitions advocated for new European Union (EU) trade rules: key members of a Sustainable Development Coalition and an Environmental Coalition include key sustainability- and environmentally-oriented EU institutions, import-dependent EU Member States, nongovernmental organisations, civil society groups, and some food and forest certifiers. Second, a PRO-EUDR Business Coalition – mainly composed of multinational business actors such as consumer goods companies and retailers, import-dependent European companies, some EU domestic producers from the agricultural sector, and their respective associations – joined the PRO-Coalitions in a strategic cross-coalitional PRO-Regulation Alliance to pursue business-oriented pro-regulatory interests. Third, the building of this Alliance facilitated political momentum for the EUDR's agenda-setting, drafting and adoption despite opposition from a weaker CONTRA-Regulation Coalition of status-quo-oriented policy advocates among some EU institutions, forest-rich EU Member States, agricultural certifiers, tropical producer country governmental authorities, as well as European and non-EU companies and their associations from the forest, agricultural and food sectors. Fourth, the EUDR's final legislative text is a compromise solution, institutionalising different core beliefs and interests of pro and contra-regulatory state and non-state actors. Pro-change actors were more powerful in institutionalising their beliefs and interests.

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