In the past few years, more than 300 companies – as well as industry groups, governments, and others – have committed to eliminating deforestation linked to the production of key food, beverage, and forest products. While these “deforestation-free” commitments hold great promise to help drive sustainability at unprecedented scale, to translate them into real benefits on the ground will require new sets of implementation mechanisms, investments, and partnerships.
In this session participants shared the game changing nature of this goal for companies. That they are taking leaps with ambitions goals – no deforestation in their supply chains – without clear plans on how to get there. That soy, palm, and paper/cardboard are three lead areas in which they are trying to work to developed approaches.
Themes that came out includes:
- In many contexts, deforestation prevention has to be integrated with community development—there needs to be economic opportunity and incentive for local stakeholders. Yet at the global level, REDD + is the only mechanism and ins’t active.
- That it takes a very effective collaboration space that can bring together global companies with local government and local companies and community / farmer s
- That we need to be learning lessons from the experiences around the world.
- That we will need much greater patience in developing land based investments – while a government concession is a start to an investment, years of understanding high value conservation areas and community development needs and opportunities are ahead.
- Traceability and transparency are going to be necessary
- Finally, all are struggling with the need to have transformative change in systems that require consistent supply chains.
