Nicole Polsterer is sustainable production and consumption campaigner at forests and rights NGO Fern.
The rumours were swirling for months, but when the news broke on October 2, it came abruptly and without warning.
Just a week earlier, the European Commission insisted that it had no plans to delay implementing the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the so-called ‘jewel’ in its flagship Green Deal, which aims to transform the EU into a low-carbon economy.
But at lunchtime on Tuesday, it made a sharp volte face, proposing a one-year delay to the application of the law, which was supposed to happen at the end of December, claiming the need to support companies and countries to better prepare for it.
The announcement prompted justified outrage, as well as fears that this marks a weakening of the EU’s resolve to confront the supreme challenge of our age: protecting nature and the climate.
The first law of its kind in the world, the EUDR was approved to great fanfare and on the back of a huge democratic mandate in June 2023.
It aims to address the biggest driver of deforestation on the planet: clearing land for agricultural production. Under the law, companies wanting access to the EU market must prove that products made from cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee and rubber are deforestation-free.
But the praise that greeted the law was replaced in recent months by a sometimes-ferocious backlash, strongly countered by the companies and countries that have already invested time and money to be ready for the December 30 deadline.
Those standing up for the EUDR include many of those who would be deeply affected, including the world’s biggest cocoa producers Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, major chocolate companies (Ferrero, Mars Wrigley, Mondelēz International and Nestlé), as well as Indigenous groups and NGOs from around the globe, who see the law’s potential not just to end destructive forest-clearing, but to help safeguard Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ territorial rights.
In the end, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen caved in to industry and political pressure and opted to delay the law’s implementation. Some of the ramifications of her decision are strikingly obvious. Others will become clearer over time.
High stakes
One obvious consequence is for the world’s forests.
As the investigative NGO Earthsight points out, a 12-month delay will mean, based on the EU’s own studies, that an estimated 2,300 km2 of forest will be destroyed – an area nearly the size of Luxembourg. For every minute the law is delayed, another football pitch-sized amount of forest will be cleared, producing in a year emissions equivalent to those from 18 million cars.
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It’s also clear that many of those who pushed for this delay want to water down or abandon the EUDR altogether. They will be determined to use the Commission’s proposal as an opportunity to achieve this. They must not be allowed to succeed.
But the EU must accept that it is also to blame for the delay.
EU dithering
First, the Commission failed to release needed guidelines in due time. Companies’ answers to their questions on how to comply were late and unclear, creating anxiety and offering an opportunity for opponents to double-down on their criticisms.
Secondly, as the Commission implicitly recognised in its statement announcing the delay, the EU has also failed to seriously work with those countries that will be most deeply affected by the law.
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For the EUDR to succeed, the EU must fundamentally change its approach, acknowledge the regulation’s impact on its trading partners and intensify efforts to support them to comply with it.
Working hand in glove with these countries must also mean working with local forest communities and civil society groups, as well as addressing the specific needs of small-scale farmers to ensure that companies don’t squeeze them out of their supply chains because of the law’s requirements.
EU member states and the European Parliament must vote against delaying this pioneering and desperately needed law – and stand firm against those hellbent on exploiting the uncertainty which now surrounds it. With wildfires raging in the drought-stricken Amazon, and in other South American countries, the stakes could not be higher.
The post Delay to EU deforestation law must not lead to dilution appeared first on Climate Home News.
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Picture an American farm in your mind.
I fell flat on my backside one afternoon this January and, weirdly, it made me think of you. Okay, I know that takes a bit of unpacking—so let me go back and start at the beginning.
For the last six years, our family has joined with half a dozen others to spend a week or so up at Wangat Lodge, located on a 50-acre subtropical rainforest property around three hours north of Sydney. The accommodation is pretty basic, with no wifi coverage—so time in Wangat really revolves around the bush. You live by the rhythm of the sun and the rain, with the days punctuated by swimming in the river and walking through the forest.
An intrinsic part of Wangat is Dan, the owner and custodian of the place, and the guide on our walks. He talks about time, place, and care with great enthusiasm, but always tenderly and never with sanctimony. “There is no such thing as ‘the same walk’”, is one of Dan’s refrains, because the way he sees it “every day, there is change in the world around you” of plants, animals, water and weather. Dan speaks of Wangat with such evident love, but not covetousness; it is a lightness which includes gentle consciousness that his own obligations arise only because of the historic dispossession of others. He inspires because of how he is.
One of the highlights this year was a river walk with Dan, during which we paddled or waded through most of the route, with only occasional scrambles up the bank. Sometimes the only sensible option is to swim. Among the life around us, we notice large numbers of tadpoles in the water, which is clean enough to drink. Our own tadpoles, the kids in the group, delight in the expedition. I overhear one of the youngest children declaring that she’s having ‘one of the best days ever’. Dan looks content. Part of his mission is to reintroduce children to nature, so that the soles of their feet may learn from the uneven ground, and their muscles from the cool of the water.
These moments are for thankfulness in the life that lives.
It is at the very end of the walk when I overbalance and fall on my arse—and am reminded of the eternal truth that rocks are hard. As I gingerly get up, my youngest daughter looks at me, caught between amusement and concern, and asks me if I’m okay.
I have to think before answering, because yes, physically I’m fine. But I feel too, an underlying sense of discomfort; it is that omnipresent pressure of existential awareness about the scale of suffering and ecological damage now at large in the world, made so much more immediately acute after Bondi; the dissonance that such horrors can somehow exist simultaneously with this small group being alive and happy in this place, on this earth-kissed afternoon.
How is it okay, to be “okay”? What is it to live with conscience in Wangat? Those of us who still have access to time, space, safety and high levels of volition on this planet carry this duality all the time, as our gift and obligation. It is not an easy thing to make sense of; but for me, it speaks to the question of ‘why Greenpeace’? Because the moral and strategic mission-focus of campaigning provides a principled basis for how each of us can bridge that interminable gulf.
The essence of campaigning is to make the world’s state of crisis legible and actionable, by isolating systemic threats to which we can rise and respond credibly, with resources allocated to activity in accordance with strategy. To be part of Greenpeace, whether as an activist, volunteer supporter or staff member, is to find a home for your worries for the world in confidence and faith that together we have the power to do something about it. Together we meet the confusion of the moment with the light of shared purpose and the confidence of direction.
So, it was as I was getting back up again from my tumble and considering my daughter’s question that I thought of you—with gratitude, and with love–-because we cross this bridge all the time, together, everyday; to face the present and the future.
‘Yes, my love’, I say to my daughter, smiling as I get to my feet, “I’m okay”. And I close my eyes and think of a world in which the fires are out, and everywhere, all tadpoles have the conditions of flourishing to be able to grow peacefully into frogs.
Thank you for being a part of Greenpeace.
With love,
David
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