A groundbreaking EU deal to ban the import of goods linked to deforestation has set a global benchmark and will hasten the passage of a similar law in the US, American lawmakers have said.
A football pitch-sized tract of forest is lost every second somewhere around the world, mostly to agricultural expansion. From 2024, the EU will require firms working in deforestation hotspots to certify that their goods have not harmed forests after a cutoff date of 31 December 2020.
The EU says this will in effect prohibit the import of commodities such as beef, soya, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, rubber, charcoal and paper, and derived products, unless their origins can be traced, using geolocation data.
The EU’s environment commissioner, Virginijus Sinkevičius, described the agreement as “the most ambitious legislative attempt to tackle these issues worldwide ever”.
From 2025, a review clause in the law could allow it to be extended to “other wooded land” such as Brazil’s Cerrado – the source of an estimated 65% of the EU’s soya-related deforestation – and to other commodities such as maize and biodiesel. From 2026, the law could cover other ecosystems with high biodiversity value or heavy carbon content.
The review is also expected to apply the law to European international financial institutions, which struck $34.7bn worth of deals with 20 companies accused of deforestation between 2016 and 2020, according to Global Witness.
Glenn Hurowitz, the CEO of the campaign group Mighty Earth, said that despite some gaps, the legislation was “historic and momentous”. He said: “We believe that if China, India, the US and Japan took the EU’s lead and emulated these key legal steps, then nearly 75% of the world’s imported deforestation could be eliminated within a few years.”
There have been fears that a US Forest Act with similar aims to the EU regulation, co-sponsored by veteran lawmakers such as Elizabeth Warren, could be blocked after Republicans took control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
However, the Democratic congressman Earl Blumenauer, the author of the draft law, said the EU’s agreement had given the safeguard legislation new impetus.
“I’m very excited,” he said. “This momentum that is being built is very, very important. Our partnership with the EU has been critical. Our differences are relatively minor and this is an opportunity for us to close ranks and encourage greater leadership from the private sector that I don’t think has to fall victim to partisan crossfire.”
Blumenauer said he was in close contact with the Biden White House and the US trade ambassador, Katherine Tai, who he said supported his approach. “It sidesteps some of the partisan difficulties [because] nobody supports illegal logging,” he said. “We’re in the process of socialising the idea, and the recent development with the EU helps accelerate that, and this is something I plan on starting early in the new Congress.”
The legislature reconvened on Tuesday. The bill’s sponsor in the Senate, Brian Schatz, said: “The EU is shutting its borders to products of deforestation, and the United States needs to follow suit. If we do nothing, the US market will become a dumping ground for commodities that can no longer make their way into Europe.”
Critics of the Forest Act say it is significantly weaker than the EU law. Greenpeace argues that it does not impose sanctions for forest degradation, has more limited enforcement powers than the EU regulation, lacks potential levers for other wooded ecosystems, and only covers “illegal” deforestation, while 30%-50% of tropical deforestation is nominally lawful.
Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace’s European food, forest and nature officer, said: “Forest destruction anywhere in the world is a disaster for nature and for the climate, whether the local government considers it legal or not. The EU’s new law is a major breakthrough for forests because it doesn’t allow any kind of deforestation to supply the EU market. It’s also the first law to set rules against forest products made by irresponsible logging of natural forests, even if lobbyists for the European logging industry carved out some major loopholes.”
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The EU’s definition of “forest degradation” was softened amid lobbying from Canada and some EU governments, which also resisted the inclusion of protections sought by the European parliament for Indigenous peoples’ human rights.
Tina Schneider, the deputy director of the US-based World Resource Institute’s forest legality initiative, said the EU’s inclusion of legal deforestation was not especially significant.
“I think it’s much more important to get as many markets as possible to pass broadly similar regulation to avoid leakage to the extent possible,” she said. “I would approach the question of zero versus zero illegal deforestation regulations more from the perspective of ‘is it feasible to pass a regulation in a key consumer country’. If so, is there political will to pass zero deforestation or only zero illegal deforestation?”
Blumenauer said that while the US proposal was unlikely to put anyone in jail, it was “an important first step” in an incremental process.
In the UK, a public consultation on “tackling illegal deforestation” closed last March, with most of the nearly 17,000 respondents reiterating the need for the government to act swiftly. However, secondary legislation has not yet been added to the Environment Act.
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Through the Environment Act, now law, we are going further than ever to protect forests and clamp down on illegal deforestation. We have already introduced world-leading due diligence legislation which helps tackle illegal deforestation in UK supply chains. Further information on our approach to secondary legislation will be published in due course.”
