This resource was originally published by Trase.

Companies buying beef from Brazil should take a data-driven approach to assessing the risks of slaughterhouses and farms supplying cattle linked to deforestation, according to a new report by Trase.

Based on the report, Trase makes four important recommendations for governments, companies and financial institutions:

• Improve data quality and transparency: The Brazilian government should prioritise filling gaps in existing datasets, particularly cattle movement records (Guia de Trânsito Animal, GTA) movement records and property registry data (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, CAR) and ensuring they are better integrated and publicly accessible.
• Adopt data-driven risk assessment: Companies and financial institutions should move away from simplified radius-based estimations. By using municipality-weighted models, organisations can identify high-volume sourcing regions that are also high risk, enabling more effective engagement with suppliers.
• Coordinate global standards: There is a need for alignment among standards organisations to provide guidance on using data-driven methods. This will encourage broader corporate disclosure and standardise how deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and other impacts are reported when farm-level data is unavailable.
• Address shared risks through landscape Initiatives: Because risks such as deforestation linked to indirect suppliers are shared by multiple slaughterhouses, it makes sense for companies to collaborate through landscape-scale investments. By sharing the costs of monitoring, legal compliance and pasture restoration, companies can improve the compliance of entire regions, reducing the risk for every participant in the supply shed.

Authors: Osvaldo Pereira, Thais Pacheco Menezes, Helen Bellfield, Andrea Santos Garcia, Nicolás Martín and Bernardo Loureiro

The factsheet highlights the Produce, Conserve, Include (PCI) as an investment-ready model designed to meet aggressive targets in Mato Grosso in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse state that produces nearly 30% of Brazil’s soy and has more than 30 million cattle, the largest herd in the country. The Mato Grosso government created the PCI strategy, a leading jurisdictional approach, for a new vision for the state’s future: increased productivity across the state while maintaining native vegetation cover and reducing deforestation.

The PCI’s ambitious vision add up to huge environmental benefits: over 6 gigatons of avoided emissions by 2030. Meeting these aggressive targets requires a multi-stakeholder effort, and the PCI brings together government agencies, civil society, producer groups and companies to drive toward impact.

This factsheet outlines the case for companies to engage in the PCI. Benefits include: (1) Progress toward corporate forest goals; (2) Incentives for sustainable expansion of production; (3) Robust and transparent statewide monitoring; (4) Reduced deforestation risk across the state; (5) Progress toward corporate climate goals; (6) Proof of concept for a new model of deforestation leadership

This paper focuses on the Rio Branco Declaration (RBD) and the 30 first-order subnational jurisdictions located in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru that signed it between 2014 and 2018, committing to reduce deforestation 80% by 2020, conditional upon adequate support from the international community. The authors assess each study jurisdiction’s progress toward that commitment in terms of reducing deforestation, and examine a subset of the potential factors supporting or slowing progress, including the existence of commensurate targets within jurisdictions’ legal frameworks and the international financial support pledged to jurisdictions.

The authors found that progress toward achieving the target was slow and likely unattainable in most jurisdictions outside of Brazil. Among the four jurisdictions likely to achieve the target under current deforestation trajectories, only Mato Grosso State has a target within its legal framework that is more ambitious than the RBD target. They also found that the international response to the RBD was sluggish and likely inadequate – with only one financial pledge made in direct response to the declaration and the majority of funding to support jurisdictional efforts coming from one source. The authors explore what may explain individual jurisdictions’ performance with respect to the target, including specific jurisdictional circumstances, national context, and international support.

Jurisdictional approaches have become popular in international forums as promising strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation and to guarantee sustainable commodity supply. Yet, despite their growing popularity, up to now, there is little consensus on how such approaches should move forward in specific jurisdictions.

In this paper the authors examine two contrasting municipal-level case studies in the eastern Amazonian state of Pará where jurisdiction-wide efforts are underway to reduce deforestation. By developing detailed forest governance intervention timelines since 2005, conducting semi-structured interviews with key informants, analyzing municipal deforestation trends, plus extensive examination of project reports, governmental documents and other secondary sources, this paper performs two main analyses. First, it characterizes the processes in each municipality by linking context and forest governance intervention timelines to deforestation trends. Second it provides a systematic comparison of processes based on (1) the role of the government, (2) multi-stakeholder participation and inclusiveness, (3) adaptive management, (4) horizontal and vertical coordination, and (5) alignment of public and private (supply-chain) initiatives. In so doing, this article answers some of the imperative questions on how to implement and improve jurisdictional approaches aimed at halting deforestation in the tropics.