Building an evidence-base for deforestation-free landscapes: supporting equitable outcomes in and beyond commodity supply-chains

Research Project, 2023 – 2026

Through commodity-driven deforestation, global food systems are major contributors to climate change and biodiversity loss. While recent years have seen a groundswell of commitments from companies, finance actors and governments to sever the link between food supply-chains and deforestation, commodity-driven tropical deforestation remains stubbornly high.
To help build knowledge to reverse this trend, this project will engage public and private sector decision makers, practitioners, and local stakeholders to co-create a robust analytical framework for assessing the effectiveness and equity of policies to halt commodity-driven deforestation. This framework will rest on clearly defined theories of change which elucidate causal mechanisms, enabling factors and barriers for policies to reduce deforestation. We will analyze a broad range of strategies for promoting deforestation-free supply-chains—from interventions aiming to reduce or shift demand to initiatives targeting supply-chain actors—aiming to develop a framework that allows assessment across sustainability domains: environmental, social and economic. Finally, drawing upon state-of-the-art data and methods, the analytical framework will be used to evaluate existing supply-chains initiatives for key commodities and countries—palm oil in Indonesia, cocoa in Cameroon, and soy or beef in Brazil—providing an informed portfolio of policy options for promoting deforestation-free commodity landscapes.