Just over a year ago, April 2024, I wrote an article on Substack titled “While tropical forests keep falling, the UK keeps stalling legislation.” The central thrust was that the UK still hadn’t introduced “secondary regulations” that would bring into force a section of the Environment Act on “forest risk commodities” that was passed in late 2021, almost two and a half years previously, despite the obvious urgency of the global tropical deforestation crisis. As that article highlighted, figures had just been released by the US-based NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) revealing that some 3.7 million hectares of tropical primary forest had been cleared in 2023.
And guess what? Here we are over a year later - three and a half years after the Environment Act - and WRI has just released its figures for 2024 - yet the UK still hasn’t taken action. Still no secondary regulations, still no forest risk commodities section of the Environment Act that means anything in practice. This is despite the fact that the Labour government, which came to power in July 2024, has been talking up the UK’s “strong global leadership” on climate.
This wouldn’t be so bad if some kind of global moratorium had been agreed and no one was knocking down the world’s forests any more, but, of course, that hasn’t happened. In fact, things last year were worse than ever: “Fires drove record-breaking tropical forest loss in 2024,” ran the headline of WRI’s article laying out the figures, before going on to say more forest was destroyed “than any other year in at least the last two decades.”
“Record-breaking tropical forest loss. . .”
And still the UK stalls.
It’s hard to know what of WRI’s analysis is more shocking. The 6.7 million hectares that their researchers estimate was lost last year, or the fact that that is the equivalent size of Panama, or 18 football fields being cleared every minute. Or that Brazil and Bolivia - Bolivia! - are so far out in front of all the other countries, between them accounting for an astonishing 64% - not far-off two thirds - of that 6.7 million. Or that Bolivia - I’ll say it again: Bolivia! - is now the world’s number two for tropical deforestation, losing more than twice as much in 2024 as third-placed Democratic Republic of the Congo - the latter more than twice the size.
To be clear, when the WRI researchers say that it is “fires” driving this destruction they don’t generally mean wild fires: they mean fires that are being set to clear the forest for agriculture which sometimes - or sometimes don’t - escape control. In other words, these are fires that are started deliberately with the ultimate aim of raising cattle to produce beef and leather, or cultivating soy, palm oil and other products which are exported to countries like the UK.
“While fires are naturally occurring in some ecosystems,” say the WRI researchers, “in tropical forests they are almost entirely human-caused, often started to clear land for agriculture and spreading out of control in nearby forests.”
The publication of WRI’s figures comes the month after a UK parliamentary debate on global deforestation during which a number of MPs unequivocally spoke in favour of bringing in regulations to implement the forest risk commodities section of the Environment Act as soon as possible. According to one of those MPs, Sarah Champion, the Labour party representative for Rotherham, “the due diligence regulation is sitting on a desk somewhere, waiting to be published.” Mary Creagh, Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), was asked more than once when the regulations would appear, but she didn’t provide an answer.
A week prior to that debate, NGOs WWF-UK and Global Witness released poll results suggesting there is “broad public consensus” across the UK to “prevent the sale of products linked to illegal deforestation overseas” and to implement the “2021 law requiring due diligence from companies.” “Since the Environment Act was passed in 2021,” the WWF-UK stated, “successive governments have had the legal powers to create a due diligence regime for commodities known to be linked to deforestation overseas, which would ban the importation and sale of food grown on illegally deforested land. However, despite three years and five Environment Secretaries, this power remains unused.”
Does DEFRA have any progress to report, now that WRI’s latest - and deeply alarming - figures have just been released? Apparently not. Just the same canned response they gave me last month: “We recognise the need to take action to ensure that UK consumption of forest risk commodities is not driving deforestation, and we will set out the next steps on this in due course.”