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How new initiatives are helping combat deforestation in the world's largest tropical rainforest
Tropical deforestation is one of the most serious contributors to climate change, representing 20 percent of global carbon emissions.
It’s an issue that needs complex solutions, and delegates at the Skoll World Forum had a chance to hear from some leading lights in the battle to slow deforestation in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical rainforest and river basin.
Even though the Amazon has lost 15 percent of its forests in the past 30 years, it is not all doom and gloom - in fact the most recent statistics show that deforestation has slowed down 75 percent from its 2004 peak, according to panelist Tasso Azevedo, a social entrepreneur and forester at development organisation Avina and one of the key people behind Brazil's National Plan to Combat Deforestation.
A combination of effective government action and private sector responses led to this sharp decline, according to panelists at Thursday’s debate, who also included Mathias Almeida, sustainability manager of Marfrig Group, one of Brazil's biggest food processing companies, and Adalberto Verissimo, co-founder and senior researcher at non-profit research organisation Imazon
The most effective mechanism was to ensure compliance, or as Verissimo put it "connect credit with compliance" - in other words, a company cannot get a bank loan if it cannot prove its compliance with anti-deforestation practices throughout its supply chain.
The Brazilian government has implemented several simple but effective reforms - such as monitoring the Amazon closely and publishing data on the Internet to improve transparency about illegal deforestation, which helped to step up enforcement and crack down on corruption.
Moreover, the government has added more protected areas in the rainforest as a way to ease conflicts over logging and land use, as well as conserving one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world.
The private sector could push these efforts even further by classifying cattle-producing farms according to compliance with regulations, said Almeida. But just how committed consumers are to paying extra for beef that is "Amazon-friendy" remains to be seen.
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