En colaboración con el Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible de Colombia y ONF Andina, el Centro REDD de la UE (EU REDD Facility) facilita el diálogo sobre los retos técnicos y financieros de la forestería comunitaria en Colombia. La forestería comunitaria sostenible puede tener un papel clave en la lucha contra la deforestación.
In collaboration with the Colombian Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development and ONF Andina, the EU REDD Facility facilitates dialogue on the technical and financial challenges of community forestry in Colombia. Sustainable community forestry can play a key role in fighting deforestation.
Ecuador y Colombia iniciaron con el Centro REDD de la UE un diagnóstico participativo para anticiparse a las nuevas políticas y requerimientos de los mercados importadores de cacao. El objetivo es disponer de un sistema nacional de información para el monitoreo del riesgo de deforestación de las cadenas de valor del cacao.
In collaboration with the EU REDD Facility, Ecuador and Colombia started a participatory diagnosis to anticipate the policy developments and future requirements of cocoa-importing markets. The aim is to build a national information system to monitor deforestation of cocoa value chains.
On 2 May 2022, as part of the XV World Forestry Congress, the EU REDD Facility and RECOFTC will co-host a hybrid side-event. The side-event will show how improved accessibility and transparency of information along complex commodity supply chains can help improve governance, build trust among trade partners, and support accountability. It will explore how to achieve this while ensuring that smallholders, local communities, and indigenous peoples can benefit from international trade.
The EU REDD Facility works with partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand the governance challenges driving deforestation and develop pragmatic approaches to advance land-use governance and sustainable development. This report presents highlights from our work in 2021.
As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to share some highlights from this year’s work by the EU REDD Facility.
This year we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our founding, taking the opportunity to reflect on the lessons we learned over the last decade. We’re working to ensure these insights help to shape and accelerate action for protecting and restoring the world’s forests.
The Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, drafted as part of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) process, is a significant achievement. The Declaration brings more than 130 countries to work collectively to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.
We’re collaborating with partner countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand the governance challenges driving deforestation, track private finance for tropical forests, and develop pragmatic approaches that monitor and deliver change for forest and land-use sector governance.
Assessing the revised climate plans of several of our partner countries, we’ve seen many opportunities to work in partnership to address forest land-use sector challenges. But we’ve also found a mixed picture in terms of overall pledges to reduce emissions, and forest-related targets.
In launching our Transparency Pathway, we offer a pragmatic method for turning policy aspirations into measures to decouple deforestation and trade. Our first Transparency Pathway insight demonstrated how supply chain data can be used to develop new understandings of commodity trade contexts. This information unlocks potential for partnerships between producers, consumers, and trader groups to shift commodity markets towards sustainability. Building on our partnership with the Trase Initiative and the support we provided to our Indonesian partners tracking jurisdictional sustainability, we found growing interest from our partner countries in supply chain transparency approaches.
This year we gave our flagship Land-use Planner a major overhaul. Partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America used the tool to help develop land-use scenarios, compare social, economic and environmental impacts, and weigh policy decisions. The tool is now available in 6 languages and more than 100 participants have been trained throughout the year, now taking the tool forward in their own programmes and land-use planning activities across the globe.
In 2022, we look forward to:
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On the second day of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, world leaders announced a pledge to save and restore our planet’s forests. With that deal came a long list of commitments from public and private sector actors to combat deforestation.
These included ambitious financial commitments to support forest protection and zero-deforestation commodities – including $7.2bn from the private sector – as well as commitments to align investments to sustainable land-use objectives. For instance, CEOs from more than 30 financial institutions, with over $8.7 trillion of global assets, have committed to eliminate investments in activities linked to agricultural commodity-driven deforestation. These commitments add up to almost a decade of announcements aimed at mobilizing private finance to support forests.
Despite this global recognition of the importance of unlocking private finance at scale to address deforestation, there is still very limited information available on the volume of capital flows into land use. These financial flows are not tracked or reported consistently. Monitoring of private finance is challenging across any sector, yet tracking flows related to land-use change in tropical forest countries is particularly challenging for many reasons. These include the issue of defining what constitutes sustainable land-use; the difficulties in accessing disaggregated data on private flows due to confidentiality and market regulations; and the very nature of land-use activities which are embedded into often largely informal rural economies.
Building robust approaches to track private flows in land-use is essential to increase the transparency of investments impacting forests and ecosystems, hold actors accountable to their commitments, and measure progress.
On 8 November, the EU REDD Facility hosted a COP26 side event to explore tracking private finance in tropical forest countries. The virtual event provided a public platform for practitioners who are paving the way towards building approaches that shed light on the private sector’s role in financing nature-based solutions and sustainable land-use.
Three presenters spoke to this topic from different angles:
Their remarks were followed by a question and answer session. We invite you to watch the event recording.
At the COP26 Indonesia Pavilion on 8 November, European Forest Institute (EFI) expert Thomas Sembres presented ideas on promoting sustainable trade through transparency and traceability in forest, agriculture commodities and trade. Speaking at the Indonesian Pavilion, Sembres made the case for raising the visibility of sustainability, and for creating more differentiation in global markets between what is sustainable and what is not. This needs to be done at scale for mainstream markets, he said, “not just for the niche markets of certified or premium products.”
While more robust traceability systems are needed as a support to more visibility for sustainability, they will not be enough unless accompanied by broader access to information, said Sembres. “Most traceability systems that exist nowadays are non-transparent traceability systems. This means that most market actors don’t have access to this information and cannot use it to promote sustainable production and trade.”
Bringing transparency to a traceability system is a delicate task, he said, with some actors fearing that more accessible information would be used against them. “At EFI we are working on this delicate task of helping governments use supply chain transparency to encourage progress towards sustainability.”
On the question of bridging differences between producer countries and consumer countries related to transparency and traceability systems, Sembres confirmed that more data was now available than ever before – but said that dialogue between market actors or between governments remained difficult. The key reason for this gap are the complexity of numerous data and traceability platforms, he said, along with distrust around the use of the data.
What is needed now, Sembres said, is simplicity and trust based on transparency and inclusive, structured and equitable processes on choice of data sources and data use. The experience of Terpercaya was a good example of how this could be achieved, he said.
“We need to build supply chains of understanding and trust. The Transparency Pathway is a way to bring public and private supply chain actors together to shift mainstream commodity markets towards sustainability.”
The EU REDD Facility has released a new Transparency Pathway Insights series, showing that supply chain and trade data can support sustainability.
The first Insight of the series explores market connections between the European Union (EU) and Brazil, Colombia and Indonesia for three major agricultural commodities — soy, coffee and palm oil.
Examining subnational data, the Facility finds that significant portions of these markets – more than half of the traded volume in Brazilian soy and Indonesian palm oil and up to 86% of traded Colombian coffee – have strong relationships with the EU market.
The scope of EU influence is even more striking when considering total traded volumes — 86% of internationally traded coffee from Colombia, 56% of palm oil produced in Indonesia and 50% of Brazilian soy.
There is now more publically available data on the trade of agricultural commodities linked to deforestation than ever before. This review of subnational supply chain data makes the case that there is significant potential for producer countries, the EU and companies in the middle to collaborate and build partnerships for a shift towards sustainable supply chains.
Know more about the Transparency Pathway.
