European Deforestation Regulation: Key Opportunities and Risks

This presentation highlights how landscape approaches can help producer countries meet the requirements of the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) in key production areas, by facilitating ‘horizontal’ collaboration. The presentation shows that landscape approaches help as landscape governance platforms encourage collaboration to verify deforestation alerts, identify deforestation drivers and mitigate risks amongst local landscape stakeholders. The EUDR will also mean that new accessible and cheap traceability solutions will begin to become the norm, as pre-competitive collaboration on traceability between offtake business at landscape or jurisdictional level can increase.

The presentation breaks down the key factors determining the EUDR’s effect on commodity production markets, and shows how this specifically corresponds to coffee, soy, cocoa and palm oil production. The presentation highlights that the biggest opportunities of the EUDR on commodity production are where small farmers dominate and the EU is the biggest buyer e.g Cocoa and coffee from Africa but the biggest risks are are where smallholders dominate but the EU is not a dominant buyer e.g Palm in SE Asia.

This presentation was delivered at the Amsterdam Declarations Partnership meeting on the 10th May 2023.