It is quite something to stand on a bare patch of ground stretching for almost as far as the eye can see where until very recently a thriving forest ecosystem stood, as I did numerous times in remote eastern Bolivia in 2022 and 2023. There are two words for it: utter desolation. No obvious sign of life, no animals or birds, just the exposed, vulnerable soil, an eery quiet and the humbling sense that something very, very wrong - an immense crime - has happened there.
Of course, those devastated areas in Bolivia that I visited were just a few sad examples of the huge swathes of tropical primary forest cut down around the world every year - an estimated 3.7 million hectares in 2023. How much longer will this go on? In addition to forests being the home or source of livelihood for over 1.5 billion people worldwide, deforestation is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that protecting and ultimately restoring forests is essential in the climate change struggle.
In November 2021, in an apparent attempt to reduce its considerable contribution to global deforestation as a consumer country, the UK included a section in its new Environment Act on “forest risk commodities” - beef and leather, soy, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, rubber, that sort of thing. But the secondary legislation required to enact that section of the Act - as well as specify exactly which commodities will fall under it - has still not been introduced. In other words, while the UK fiddles, to riff on the old Nero and Rome cliché, the world’s forests burn - or are bulldozed.
For months, spokespeople from the now-departed Conservative government said that the secondary legislation was “imminent”, all the while making statements that gave the impression the only reason for protecting forests is because they’re habitat to emblematic animals like “great apes, tigers, leopards and jaguars.” As for the new Labour government, their manifesto made no mention of global deforestation at all, while the King’s Speech, delivered by Charles III last month, failed to do so too.
Not that we want a rushed, botched job. As NGOs, parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee and even British supermarkets have all argued, and as I have done via Substack, numerous amendments need to be made to both the Act itself as well as what has been proposed for the secondary legislation. Such much-needed amendments include bringing the UK’s legislation more up to the standard of the new European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), extending the Act to all deforestation - not just what is illegal - as well as improving the due diligence procedures that companies have to comply with, ensuring that indigenous peoples’s rights are respected in accordance with international law, enlarging the proposed list of commodities in scope of the Act, and including the financial sector, among other things.
Any sense of action from within the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on this issue? They didn’t respond to my request for comment, but in mid-July 15 NGOs wrote to the Secretary of State for the Environment urgently requesting a meeting.
“We have worked with civil servants, parliamentarians, industry, and representatives of Indigenous Peoples and smallholder groups, to call for improvements to the UK’s plans,” the NGOs wrote. “This includes the need for improving the primary legislation, and the proposals for secondary regulations - which will determine the commodities and companies in scope, what level of traceability companies must achieve in their high-risk supply chains, which laws will be applicable and how companies will be able to demonstrate compliance, and how the regulations will be monitored and enforced. It is vital for the health of people and planet that these enabling regulations are set to the highest level of ambition, and are accompanied by capacity building and implementation that equitably addresses the needs of IPLCs and smallholders.”
“The highest level of ambition. . .” That’s what the new Labour government should aim for. Anything less and their promise to restore the UK’s global “climate leadership” will not only be embarrassingly presumptuous, but yet more blah blah blah.