The conversion and degradation of tropical forests has multiple negative impacts on society including land conflict, increasing income inequality, carbon emissions, and biodiversity loss. In turn, their restoration can be a powerful source of climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and rural development. The major driver of forest loss and damage in the tropics is the expansion of agricultural areas for the production of food commodities (i.e. beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, and soybeans) and associated land management practices (i.e. fire usage, peatland drainage).
In recent years, the companies that handle or invest in forest-risk products have responded to civil society and consumer pressure to decouple their supply chains from deforestation and forest degradation by adopting a range of forest-focused supply chain policies (FSPs). The suite of FSPs includes company and regional zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to not source from suppliers that deforested their land (e.g. Unilever’s Zero-deforestation Policy and the Soy Moratorium in the Brazilian Amazon) and the development of approved supplier lists based on certifications that verify zero-deforestation and/or reforestation on properties (e.g. Rainforest Alliance (RFA) certification). These policies are highly relevant for EU efforts to reduce the impacts of their international supply chains such as the new EU Deforestation Regulation.
The adoption of these FSPs by major global food and finance companies, many of which are based in Europe, represents an unprecedented opportunity to overcome the limited institutional capacities of individual countries to achieve wide-scale tropical forest conservation. Yet, the literature examining the impacts of these emerging policies is still limited in several ways. First, it is highly clustered in a handful of production regions. Second, there is almost no methodological consistency between studies. Research designs vary in spatial and temporal scales, definitions employed to characterize forests, and statistical methods to detect impacts. For example, studies of the G4 Cattle Agreement in the Brazilian Amazon have found everything from high compliance and reduced deforestation to no net impact, to negative spillovers to the Cerrado. Third, nearly all existing FSP studies have focused on measuring impacts, not assessing why FSPs have succeeded or failed. This clustering, methodological heterogeneity, and focus on impacts inhibits our ability to draw cross-mechanism conclusions about the conditions that enable or constrain FSP effectiveness and equity. To address the shortcomings of the existing literature, a coordinated, pan-tropical effort to diagnose the mechanisms linking FSPs to improved conservation and livelihood outcomes is urgently needed. Another key limitation in the literature is a lack of experimentation. Greater effort is needed to test new mechanisms to shifts farmers behaviours beyond exclusion from certain supply chains and limited price premiums.
The goal of this research is to provide major advancements in our understanding of the conditions under which forest-focused supply chain policies lead to improved conservation and livelihoods in the tropics through five major innovations:
1. A coordinated pan-tropical analysis of multiple forest-risk commodities,
2. Simultaneous examination of conservation and livelihood outcomes,
3. A focus on mechanisms, not just measures of impact,
4. Comparative study with triangulation across multiple scales and methods, and
5. Randomised control trials in partnership with companies to test new interventions.
The resulting analysis will provide urgently needed policy recommendations to better tailor the design of forest-focused supply chain policies for specific governance, market, land use, and cultural contexts.
