Rainforest distraction: who are the bad guys and who are the good guys? Which companies are driving deforestation by using impacting row materials, and which companies adopted safe practices to avoid any link with deforestation throughout their supply chain? The Canadian organization Canopy present Foreste 500, a system to identify, rank, and track for the first time the governments, companies and financial institutions worldwide that together could virtually eradicate tropical deforestation.
As an example, at the top of the list we find Danone and Nestlé (both companies have good forest policies and are implementing them, including transparent reporting), while at the bottom are Kraft and Kikkoman (both without forest policies and no implementation).
The majority of tropical forest loss and degradation is driven by the production of just a handful of globally traded ‘forest risk’ commodities: namely palm oil, soya, beef, leather, timber, and pulp and paper. These commodities move along complex supply chains – from producers, to traders, processors, manufacturers and retailers – ending up in over 50% of packaged goods in supermarkets worldwide. Through these commodities, we are all part of a hidden deforestation economy.
Yet these commodities can be produced sustainably without impacting tropical forests and there is now clear global consensus that the transition to deforestation free supply chains must be urgently achieved.
In September 2014, leaders from governments, major multinationals, indigenous communities and civil society signed the landmark New York Declaration on Forests. It spells out ambitious commitments to end deforestation, including by eliminating it from the production of agricultural commodities by 2020. This mirrors an earlier pledge by the Consumer Goods Forum, a global alliance of 400 companies with combined sales of three trillion dollars, to achieve net zero deforestation supply chains by 2020. Similar commitments have been made within the financial community, most notably through the Environment Initiative Banking.
Forest 500 meets a pressing need by measuring progress towards these ambitious goals and by identifying other powerbrokers across sectors that may not yet have commitments or policies in place to tackle deforestation.
To measure progress towards these goals the Global Canopy Programme has developed rigorous methodologies to identify and rank governments, companies and financial institutions based on their public policies and potential impacts on forests related to forest risk commodities. Specifically, the Forest 500 assesses 50 jurisdictions (25 forest countries, 15 trading countries, 10 subnational forest jurisdictions); 250 companies from different parts of the supply chain; 150 investors and lenders; and 50 other powerbrokers.
The Forest 500 ranking and analysis will be repeated annually until 2020, to help inform, enable and track progress towards this urgent global goal.