UK urgently needs better legislation to reduce global deforestation footprint
Still no secondary regulations have been issued despite Environment Act passing two years ago
Two years ago to this day, 9 November 2021, Royal Assent was given to the first major piece of UK environmental legislation since exiting the European Union (EU): the Environment Act. While the vast majority of the law is about the management and protection of the UK’s own environment - no surprises there - one small section tacked on towards the end concerns the environments of other countries - specifically, their forests.
The reason? To curb the UK’s complicity in ever-accelerating global deforestation as a result of the “forest risk commodities” - or products derived from such commodities - that make their way to our shores. According to the Act, “forest risk commodities” are those that are produced from forest being - or possibly being - chopped down and “converted to agricultural use.” Last year 6.6 million hectares of forest around the world were cleared.
“As one of the world’s major economies, [the UK] is one of the biggest consumers of commodities driving deforestation far away in other parts of the world,” Sam Lawson, director of the UK-based NGO Earthsight, told me when I wrote about the Act two years ago before it became law. “People sometimes think about what they’re buying when they buy a wood product, but when they buy a bar of soap, ice-cream or chicken it doesn’t occur to them that it could be linked to deforestation in Brazil or Indonesia. So if we care about the world’s forests - and most British people would say that they do - those same people would be shocked to learn how complicit they have been made to be by the failures of corporations and government.”
The Act explicitly bans “forest risk commodities” from UK commercial activities “unless relevant local laws were complied with” when producing them - basically, if they were produced as a result of illegal deforestation. The “forest risk commodities” themselves - e.g. beef and other cattle products, soy, palm oil, coffee, rubber etc - weren’t specified, but that was supposed to happen later in “regulations made by the Secretary of State.”
Sounds quite encouraging, right? Not so fast. In addition to the fundamental weaknesses of the Act on this issue - not least the fact that it only applies to illegal deforestation, which threatens to render the Act largely meaningless in practice or even create perverse incentives that will accelerate deforestation - there is the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has never got around to enacting the regulations and specifying the commodities covered by the Act. In other words, to date it really has been meaningless.
Earlier in the year, when I sent three questions to DEFRA about this, the reply was eerily hopeless: “We are looking into this for you. However, it is taking some time to get a response. Please could we have some specific questions and we will do our best to answer those as soon as possible.” After I sent a further five questions - two the same as before, all of them specific - I received no reply at all. That was nine months ago.
Of course, given the complexity of global supply-chains, it is impossible to know how much deforestation around the world can be directly or indirectly attributed to the UK, but two researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Oxford-based NGO Global Canopy have just had a partial stab at it. In a paper released this week titled “The exposure of the UK’s direct imports to tropical deforestation since November 2021”, Mark Titley and Chris West found that “in the two years since the Environment Act was passed the UK’s direct imports of seven forest risk commodities can be associated with at least 20,400 hectares of tropical and subtropical deforestation.”
These figures “are likely to be an underestimate” and the “UK’s exposure is likely to be substantially larger”, Titley and West point out, given that their research only takes into account “direct imports” or “direct trade” rather than “total consumption” and ““embedded” sources of deforestation exposure.” “Due to the detail available in customs records. . . it was not possible to include commodities imported in more processed forms,” the authors continue, like “oil palm in processed and manufactured goods, or processed rubber products such as tyres.”
The highest risk commodities identified by Titley and West are “oil palm, soya and cattle products”, while the “top six producer countries” impacted are Indonesia, Brazil and - to a much lesser extent - Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Colombia and the Ivory Coast. In a media statement the NGO Global Witness, which commissioned the research, quoted Lord Zac Goldsmith, who was a Minister for the Environment when the Act became law, saying that “the government needs to stop with the delays and u-turns and get on with it.”
“We passed the Environment Act with much fanfare, not least so we could present ourselves as a world leader at COP26 which we hosted in Glasgow in 2021,” Goldsmith says. “And it was a genuinely landmark law to cut illegal deforestation caused by commodity production from our supply chains. But there has been virtually no progress since the law passed and not a single tropical tree has yet been saved.”
Major retailers including Aldi, Asda, The Co-op, Iceland, Lidl, Marks & Spencer, Nestle, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Unilever and Waitrose have also grown fed up of waiting. Last month they and other companies comprising the Retail Soy Group wrote to the UK’s Secretary of State for the Environment, Thérèse Coffey, requesting that the “Government urgently follows through on its promise to deliver secondary legislation to implement the requirements of the Environment Act”, as well as “aligning this legislation with the EU’s Deforestation Regulation”, which came into force in June this year and is much stronger than the UK’s Act in various ways. Unless the Act includes all deforestation, as the EU Regulation does, then these companies’s commitments to going “deforestation-free” by 2025 will be impossible to meet.
“Without a UK legal requirement, British companies further up our supply chains are unwilling to provide the necessary transparency and/or deforestation-free goods to deliver,” the retailers wrote to Coffey. “The European Union’s Deforestation Regulation supplements our efforts, but our British supply chains remain uniquely exposed because of the lack of legislative progress in the UK. Deforestation cannot be ignored any longer. While UK legislative progress has been delayed, 7.87 million hectares of primary forest has been lost in just the last two years.”
Why is it taking DEFRA so long? Anyone who knows anything about deforestation would agree that it shouldn’t take two years to establish that beef and other cattle products, soy and palm oil etc should all be deemed “forest risk commodities.” When I asked DEFRA again about it, this week, I was sent the same canned quote they had just sent to The Guardian - including the same typo - and told they will be “setting out [their] next steps imminently.”
“The vast majority deforestation for commercial agriculture is conducted in violation of laws in producer countries, which is why our Environment Act includes world-leading due diligence legislation to help tackle this illegal activity and to rid these products from UK retail shelves,” says a DEFRA spokesperson. “Our approach is based on partnership with producer countries and will reinforce the efforts of governments in producer countries to ensure sustainable forest and land use.”