While tropical forests keep falling, the UK keeps stalling legislation
Environment Act regulations still pending as latest global deforestation figures are released
Yet more Very Bad News about the world’s tropical primary forests. 3.7 million hectares were lost last year, according to the latest analysis from NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) and University of Maryland (UoM) researchers, meaning that the planet is a long way off track from achieving “zero deforestation” by 2030, as promised by almost 150 country leaders at the United Nations “COP26” climate change conference three years ago.
3.7 million hectares is 9% less than what was lost in 2022, but it is still obviously a fair-sized slice of the planet, habitat and biodiversity. It is the equivalent of almost 10 football fields of forest being cleared every minute, WRI estimates, and it released some 2.4 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - “almost half of the annual fossil fuel emissions of the United States.”
So what to do? The WRI recommends “incentives and financial mechanisms that place a value on standing forests [making them] less vulnerable to depletion from farms, mines, infrastructure or other economic activities”, “regulatory or voluntary measures to eliminate deforestation from commodity supply chains [which] can help to counter economic drivers of tropical deforestation”, and “investments in the bioeconomy.”
The wording of that second recommendation can hardly be described as the most enthusiastic endorsement for legislation, but nevertheless it should be a wake-up call for governments everywhere - the UK’s in particular. After all, it has been more than two years now since the passing of the Environment Act which includes a section ostensibly intended to curb the UK’s complicity in deforestation around the world as a result of the “forest risk commodities” - or products derived from such commodities - that make their way to our shores. Yet the secondary legislation required for that section of the Act to come into force has still not been enacted - and therefore it remains utterly meaningless in practice.
This is especially worth highlighting given that two of the three countries that the WRI’s recently-released analysis really hammers for “sharp increases in forest loss” in 2023 were among the top 10 tropical forest countries most impacted by UK consumption patterns in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, according to a “commodity footprints” platform developed by the UK government itself through the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York. One of those countries is Bolivia, where, in 2022 and 2023, I saw huge areas of what was recently forest cleared to grow soy beans. The other is Laos, which has experienced a steady, constant rise in UK-associated deforestation from 2015 onwards.
The UK has already taken all kinds of action and pledged huge sums of money ostensibly aimed at tackling global deforestation, but how much more forest will be destroyed before it mans-up and shows real leadership, as the UK so likes to bang on about, by adopting legislation? Legislation with teeth, that is. In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in December urging the UK to urgently enact the secondary legislation, Aldi, Co-op, Lidl, Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose stated that since the Environment Act had been passed two years previously almost eight million hectares of primary forest around the world had been lost.
The current wording of the Act is desperately flawed, it must be highlighted, while certain details about the secondary legislation have already been revealed and raised concerns even more - particularly the fact that only beef, leather, soy, palm oil and cocoa are set to be included, and not coffee, maize, rubber, among other things. Despite repeated calls from numerous NGOs for years, as well as the House of Commons’s Environmental Audit Committee in a report in January, to amend and improve the legislation in various ways - e.g. include more “forest risk commodities”, make it apply to all deforestation rather than just what is deemed illegal in the producer countries, extend it to the financial sector etc - the government appears to be unmoved, as made clear in a response to the EAC’s report published late last month.
Five days before that government response was published, at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Deforestation, Lord Benyon, Minister of State for Climate, Environment and Energy at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), had reportedly said that “time is of essence” and that the secondary regulations were “imminent.” But that was precisely what DEFRA told The Guardian, myself and no doubt others five months ago: we will be “setting out our next steps imminently.”
DEFRA’s response this week: it will happen “as soon as the parliamentary time allows.”