🌱 Risky Business: The Deforestation Debate, WWF's new wood risk tool, and Dr Bronner's $100 million investment.
🌱 Risky Business: The Deforestation Debate, WWF's new wood risk tool, and Dr Bronner's $100 million investment.
Featuring Daiya Foods, The Body Shop, Oatly, Dr Bronner and more...
Happy Monday!
This week we cover:
Quick Take: Risky Business: The Deforestation Debate, and an overview of WWF’s Wood Risk Tool.
Brand Spotlight: Dr Bronner: On an ‘All-One’ mission to heal the planet.
In case you missed it: 🌱 Looking to the future: 6 tools to risk map your supply chain, and how Solar Foods are creating 'the most sustainable protein in the world'.
Thank you for your support in 2024. With 53k+ newsletter views, 1200+ LinkedIn reactions and 2100+ new LinkedIn followers last year, we’re excited to be heading into our third year delivering good news, inspiring brands and helpful resources straight to your inbox. Think your colleagues need some extra inspiration in 2024?
As always - we’re always open to feedback, ideas and collaborations, say hi via info@followingthefootprints.com.
> Good News Last Week
🎯 Daiya Foods Inc launched its updated vegan cheese lineup that are made from a base of its oat cream and using traditional fermentation techniques to better mimic dairy cheese. This technology is done in its British Columbia facility, which it claims is “the largest standalone plant-based facility of its kind in North America”.
⭐️ Marks and Spencer announced that as of this year, it has donated 70 million meals to local charities with their food redistribution partner Neighbourly, to more than 3,000 local charities and community organisations.
⭐️ Oatly won a court case against Dairy UK which will allow them to continue using their coined slogan “Post-Milk Generation”. Dairy UK argued that the phrase created consumer confusion, because the word ‘milk’ should only be used for animal-derived products.
⭐️ Arla Foods announced their partnership with ENORM, an insect farm, to reduce their food waste. Arla will feed delactosed permeate, a by-product of dairy production, to Enorm to be used as feed stock for black soldier fly larvae. The larvae can then be used as animal feed or even a protein source for humans.
⭐️ Aldi UK announced that they are exceeded their target of halving food waste by 2030, therefore updating their target to reduce the food waste by 90% by 2020. They also donated 1.5 million meals over the festive period by partnering up with local charities, community groups and food banks.
⚡️ The Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) initiated the process of developing a global roadmap to eliminate hunger and all forms of malnutrition without exceeding the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. The global roadmap outlines strategy spanning the next three years that includes diverse portfolio of solutions across ten distinct domains of action.
> Click on each link to read more.
> Quick Take
Risky Business: The Deforestation Debate, and an overview of WWF’s Wood Risk Tool.
Deforestation’s been a particularly hot topic in the news over the last two months. At COP28’s Nature Day, the UK government announced new laws to ‘ensure that there is no place on our supermarket shelves for products which have been produced on land linked to illegal deforestation’. It’s a step beyond current voluntary approaches, will be implemented via the Environment Act and will only apply to businesses with a global annual turnover of over £50 million and annual use of over 500 tonnes of regulated commodities. However, the proposed ban doesn’t cover legal deforestation and a date for when this legislation will be introduced has yet to be provided. As a result, many are concerned that ‘perverse incentives’ will be created for export countries to remove protection on their ecosystems in order to bypass the ban (effectively making it legal) and that there will be delays in implementing any level of the ban at all. Much of this pressure has been applied by the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), with MPs submitting a 66-page report to the Government on 4th January - they now have two months to respond.
What’s the issue?
According to WWF and RSPB, the UK’s ‘Overseas Land Footprint’ to produce beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy and timber is an area equivalent to 88% of the UK’s own land area (annually, 2016-2018). An increase of 15% on 2011-2015 calculations, the UK uses a total of 21.3 million hectares per year to satisfy demand, affecting an estimated 2,800 species and achieving a higher consumption intensity than China. 28% of this footprint is located in countries with a ‘very high’ and ‘high’ risk score relating to the destruction of nature and labour issues locally. A lot of statistics, we know - we like this resource for zooming out to see the historic effect we’ve had on our global forest stock too.
Hold up, what do we mean by an ‘Overseas Land Footprint’? Put simply, it’s a consumption-based indicator that looks at the resources needed (could be by a country, or an organisation) to create a final product. Production-based indicators look internally at resource use within a country to create that product instead.
The largest increase in land footprint is from timber-based commodities, including pulp and paper. The import of fuel wood for bioenergy production has been a huge driver for this, largely led by UK policies on renewable energy. Whilst the Amazon rainforest is typically where the mind jumps when deforestation is mentioned - when it comes to Timber, Russia is our biggest source country. Zooming out beyond the UK, it's estimated that 15-30% of global timber harvest comes from illegal origins. Not only does illegal trade often violate human rights and ecosystems alike, it also undercuts more responsible suppliers - damaging local economic potential.
As always, it’s not all bad news - with 50% of deforestation and land conversion attributed to commercial agriculture and forestry, there’s a lot that we can do as an industry. Lucky for us, a new tool has been added to the WWF Risk Filter Suite by WWF’s Forests Forward team which allows users to evaluate their supply chain risk for wood. Let’s take a look…
Introducing: WWF’s Wood Risk Tool!
The Wood Risk Tool allows you to review risk associated with the country of origin and the species of your wood purchases. Using this information will enable your business to identify the risk hotspots in your supply chain and importantly take proactive steps to reduce the risk of purchasing wood from illegal or unacceptable sources.
What do we like about this tool? As with the other WWF Risk Filter Suite tools, the Wood Risk Tool provides a colour coded risk summary which helps quickly identify risks and provides more information to help you understand them too. However, unlike the Biodiversity and Water Risk Tools, this tool does provide suggested control measures for identified risks.
Key callouts:
This tool relies heavily on FSC certification as an indication of risk. Though this is a highly respected certification body, the cost implications for small-scale forest stewards can be a barrier. For now, Forests Forward acknowledges that issue and are working on alternative ways to verify sustainable forest management by smallholder and indigenous peoples, taking context and methods into account.
It is important to request the scientific name for the wood you are purchasing to get the best out of this tool. Many wood products are traded under common wood names even if they are not technically from that species.
Since this is a free tool it is not only great to use for your own business supply chain, but also ideal for sharing directly with your suppliers so that they can also identify their risks.
As regulations and new items of research are released the tool will be updated. There is currently a mix of very new data and some older data linked to the risk categories.
According to the WWF, there are a couple of other things your business can do to mitigate your impact on deforestation - via wood-based materials or other commodities:
Set policies and commitments which are time-bound and aligned with the Accountability Framework initiative, then implement these as soon as possible.
Report publicly on progress
Engage with suppliers, and support their journeys to implement similar policies and commitments across the supply chain.
Advocate for further action among peers and wider stakeholders.
We’d love to hear from you - if your brand has taken steps to map or mitigate your risk (wood or other commodities) please get in touch (info@followingthefootprints.com). We’re always looking for ways to help brands share their learnings, especially as the conversation around deforestation evolves.
> Brand Spotlight
Dr Bronner’s ‘All-One’ mission to heal the planet.
Dr Bronner is on a mission. The 76 year old soap, body care and now chocolate brand has been driving their ‘ALL-ONE!’ message from the start - piloting refill stores, achieving 80% PCR (post-consumer recycled) material used in their plastic packaging, reducing water use in their filling machines by 85% - their progress is extensive. Lucky for us, they hold transparency pretty highly too. Details on their financial stewardship, environmental footprint and so much more are littered throughout their 2023 All-One report (it’s fascinating, trust us and have a quick scroll).
In the last 20 years alone, Dr Bronner has donated over $100 million to activism and charitable causes - from fighting to raise the US minimum wage through to conserving our oceans. More than anything, they’re committed to powering the transition from industrial to regenerative agriculture and avoiding the spread of both legal and illegal deforestation as a result. Let’s get to the root of it…
Dr Bronner vs Deforestation:
Implementing Regenerative Practices: Taking just one example - at the Serendipalm project in Ghana, Dr Bronner has contributed $1 million via the 10% fair trade premium they pay to self-directed community projects to develop ‘dynamic agroforestry’ systems - mixing trees such as cocoa, palm and timber with short-term crops such as cassava, bananas and papayas. Typically, such agroforestry yields 1.5x more than a monoculture planted with the same crops.
Local Education: Serendipalm isn’t alone - Dr Bronner has an entire ‘Special Operations’ team dedicated to education and practices that build up soil fertility and organic matter. An example of the impact of this roaming support system is via their mint oil supplier in India, where (amongst other initiatives kick-started by a 2017 visit from the Dr Bronner Special Ops team) 10,000 tons a year of subsidised compost will be available to over 1,200 small-scale farmers to increase biomass, sequester carbon and boost microbial life.
Certifying Supply Chains: Since 2005, they’ve been building ‘regenerative supply chains’ for all their products. To date, almost all of their palm oil and cocoa (‘bad crops’, as they acknowledge them) have been sourced from small farms that are organic and fair trade, working with Fair for Life to achieve this and sourcing over $20.7 million of fair trade product alone in 2022. More recently, they’ve even been working with allies like Patagonia and the Rodale Institute to craft the Regenerative Organic Standard too. To them, it’s ‘not the crop - it’s how you grow it’. The three standards together prevent the conversion of forest to agricultural land. Elsewhere, USDA Organic, Fair Trade and non-GMO are other certifications they adhere to, for the benefit of their products and their producers.
Female Empowerment: From partnerships with KANY (a fair trade and organic women’s cooperative in Côte d’Ivoire with >160 farmers) to sourcing coconut sugar from Aliet Green (an award-winning woman-owned business in Indonesia) Dr Bronner is deeply committed to the principle that regenerative systems are truly equitable systems too.
Scrolling through Dr Bronner’s list of projects and partnerships, and reading in detail about the people they’re working with, is a rich education in their global supply chain. Working hard to shift their industry to more responsible sourcing practices and away from exploitative and destructive forms of agriculture, they’re a brand taking stand and we couldn’t be more inspired.
Take a closer look at Dr Bronner:
> In case you missed it
🌱 Looking to the future: 6 tools to risk map your supply chain, and how Solar Foods are creating 'the most sustainable protein in the world'.
Featuring Solar Foods, ASKET, Abel & Cole, WHSmith, Faith in Nature and more...
> Follow up with…
Article: How The CFO Drives Stakeholder Alignment And Value In A Sustainability-Focused World
Article: Global Fashion Houses, NGOs Call on Industry to Commit to Deforestation-Free Leather
Podcast: Diego Saez-Gil, Pachama & Sam Gill, Sylvera - Forestry Carbon Offsets
👉 Pssst - want to be featured in our ‘Meet the Partners’ series? Reach out here!