Zero-deforestation pledges need help, support to meet targets, new study finds

It’s become a trend for big corporations to pledge that their products won’t cause any more deforestation. And while many experts believe in the potential of these “zero-deforestation” commitments to slow or stop deforestation, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that a number of challenges hamstring the efforts. “These companies stand poised to break the link between commodity production and deforestation,” co-author and environmental scientist Holly Gibbs of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a statement. “To do that, more immediate action is needed to demonstrate commitment to change and to clear the haze surrounding these efforts.” Gibbs and a team of colleagues from nearly a dozen other institutions around the world looked at commitments to cut deforestation from company supply chains in recent years. Nearly 450 corporations made 760 such promises by March of 2017. Yet the early evidence seems to indicate that they may not be making as much of a difference as hoped, so the researchers set out to figure out why. Deforestation for an oil palm plantation in Sarawak, Malaysia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. The team examined the different approaches, looking at whether they are announced by a single company on its own or as part of a group, for example, as well as whether they define a set of discrete actions aimed at tackling the deforestation in their supply chains, or they merely lay out a set of targets. In the latter case, the commitment may predominantly serve…

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