 afternoon everyone. So I'm Anna Gross. I'm a Science and Environment reporter at the Financial Times. I'm very pleased to be here with all of you and to be taking part in the Trace Yearbook webinar launch. As many of you may know, the yearbook is Trace's flagship assessment of the state of forest risk commodity supply chains. The assessment uses Trace's unique supply chain data to reveal the commodities, regions and supply chains with the largest impacts on tropical forests, showing where efforts should be targeted to tackle deforestation. So this is going to be a one-hour webinar. We're going to start with a 15 to 20-minute presentation on the key findings of the yearbook by Toby Gardner, who's Trace's director, and Helen Belfield, his Global Canopy Policy Director. After their presentation I'll invite some of Trace's amazing guest speakers to share different perspectives on the yearbook findings. So our guest speakers, all women, are Frances Seymour, Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute, Nicole Polstera, Sustainable Consumption and Production Campaigner at Fern, Deborah Diaz, Sustainability Manager at the Consumer Goods Forum. Her camera isn't working but you'll be able to hear her voice just fine. And Alice Thule, who's Deputy Director of Instituto Centro Givida. And after their comments we're going to have a short Q&A session. So I'll be asking some questions but I'd also like to invite any of you guys to send in your own questions. You can just type them into the Q&A box and I'll be able to read them at the end and I'll try to cover as many of them as possible. So we have loads to cover and we don't have a huge amount of time and I'd like to invite Toby Gardner to start with his presentation on the yearbook findings. Toby, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Anna. Can you just tell me if you can see my screen? Yeah I can see it. Great, thanks very much everybody and welcome and thanks so much for joining us. For those that are not familiar with Trace I'd like to just start off by mentioning what we're doing. Trace is a science-based supply chain transparency initiative that is focused on trying to empower markets governments and civil society in a transition towards more sustainable commodity production and consumption. And our mission in contributing towards this is to help revolutionize the transparency of global trade and the way in which we've been pioneering this is to develop a new approach that allows the mapping of supply chains from regions where commodities are produced to countries where they're imported via the companies involved and we're starting new work to look at patterns of ownership and financing of this trade as well. And this unique approach allows us to connect markets to production regions and therefore also to impacts deforestation but also to sustainability conditions and investments on the ground. The Trace yearbook is as Anna said our main product that tries to help deliver on two of the core agendas that Trace is trying to support on the one hand to help empower and enable actors in markets in government and civil society to make more effective decisions around managing risk and around targeting investments for more sustainable supply chains and the other is on strengthening the accountability around supply chains to help deliver on sustainability goals and reduce deforestation associated emissions across the tropics. And the yearbook helps achieve this in a number of ways and you just get a flavor here of the content that is now live that you can look on in more depth where we have summaries and key statistics and indicators on the seven commodities that we're looking at which is Brazilian soy and beef, Paraguayan soy and beef exports, Argentinian soy and also exports of palm oil from Indonesia and chicken from Brazil with the embedded soy and beef soy and corn in chicken exports. And you also have summaries across the four main themes of expansion deforestation the main traders and markets hotspots of risk exposure and deforestation commitments. So without further ado the focus of our presentation now is on the four main questions that the yearbook because a whole and indeed Trace as a whole is trying to answer. First what is the problem that we're trying to address how much agricultural expansion is linked to deforestation where we're really drawing on work by many others. And then secondly who is buying the forest risk commodities and from where which markets are dominating which players are dominating. What are the patterns of dominance that we can see? Third what are the greatest sources of deforestation risk in the supply chains of major buyers? To what extent can we see where patterns of risk exposure and deforestation are concentrated? And fourth and finally what is the coverage of zero deforestation commitments that are being made not only by companies but also by governments and what impacts are we starting to see that they're having that Trace can help tell us. So first in agricultural expansion in conversion we saw recently the data that was launched by WRI through GFW telling us that the the rate of increase in the last year of 2.8% was the third largest in their time series since 2000. Identifying and underscoring the fact that deforestation remains high and increasing across many parts of the tropics. There are some good news stories with deforestation decreasing year on year for the last three years in some parts of Indonesia and elsewhere but there are many other areas where deforestation is on the rise and new frontiers are emerging. And of course we're mostly familiar with the news of the resurgence of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in the last few years but also in many of the neighboring countries of Brazil. And the focus of our work in the yearbook is on the three biomes in Latin America particularly in Brazil of the Amazon and the Sahara but also the Chaco and the Atlantic Forest as well in Paraguay and in Argentina. Where if we look across the board of all three of these biomes annual deforestation rates have dropped if we compare to a decade ago. So there is cause for celebration in some places but it's worth bearing in mind that whilst these rates have dropped that has been in some cases such as in the Atlantic Forest of Paraguay because the forest has been mostly gone and there's also been this recent research in deforestation not only in Brazil but in neighboring countries and what is also critically important is when we look at biomes that have diminished in size as continued clearances continue the relative impact of that clearance is greater for the biomes that have suffered more historical loss. So in comparing across the biomes and the analyses that we've done suggests if you look at the impact of a hectare of deforestation per hectare of forest remaining or per hectare of native vegetation remaining which is an interesting perspective then one hectare of loss in the Grand Chaco is equivalent in those terms to six and a half hectares of loss in the Amazon bringing into focus just how much has already been lost in the Chaco but also in the Sahara. Now we know that cattle pasture is the dominant direct driver of deforestation across much of the tropics and the analyses that we've done to cross detailed land use change maps land cover maps with deforestation at the pixel level really underscore this with the expansion of pastures for cattle grazing in 2018 being attributed to deforestation due to that expansion from somewhere near 95 percent in the Paraguayan Chaco over 80 percent in the Amazon and over half of the deforestation in the Sahara. Direct deforestation for soy is concentrated as we know in the Sahara. Historically there has been large expansion of agriculture particularly for soy in Argentina in the Chaco and also in the Atlantic forests of Paraguay but at the moment the main areas of expansion are in the Sahara and particularly the Matapipa region that we're familiar with and we know that if we look over time this is just a transition of increased cumulative deforestation along the bottom there with production of soy in the Sahara and we can see that large expanses deforestation for relatively little increases in production some years ago have been changed for an optic in production with relatively less deforestation in recent years as that curve becomes steeper but in 2018 we still estimate that about 100,000 hectares of Sahara was cleared with intent to grow soy if we look back at recent conversion of land that's been converted into soy in recent years but we also know that soy can be an important indirect driver of deforestation which is something that we've started to look at in our team and preliminary work that we've done indicates that for every hectare of pasture that is lost to agricultural expansion and here we see a map of black areas which are pastures that have been lost to agricultural expansion mostly soy for every hectare of pasture that is lost at least one hectare of pasture expands on to on to forested land so that transition implies that there is a strong dynamic of an indirect dynamic of land use change at play so if we look at the expansion the loss of pasture due to agricultural expansion and compare that to the expansion of soy on to pasture here in blue then you can see that the two coincide very neatly and then we look at the expansion of pasture on to forest and we can see that it's being displaced into other regions of the regions of forest shifting now to look at which are some of the major markets and the major trends that we see in the data with regards to the destiny of these commodities from these countries but one clear pattern of course is the fact that the trade in these commodities is concentrated in the hands of relatively few companies if we look just in the soy sector across Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay and somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of that trade is in the hands of five companies and if we look at the top five companies here across across those countries the ABCD and COFCO then we can see that more than half of the total exports are in the hands of those of those companies and typically what we find is that the market share of trade by companies is typically somewhat proportionate to their share of the overall deforestation risk so this is a plot that shows you the amounts of volume that then transitioned to the overall deforestation risk that the major traders of Brazilian beef are associated with and they're roughly the same but some important companies start to come up when you look from the perspective not a volume but of deforestation risk those are the sourcing from particularly high-risk regions and if we look at markets what we can see in recent years has been a real surge in the dominance of China whereas 15 years ago the European Union by far dominated imports of Brazilian soy this is looking at just the trajectory of of soy exports we can see that in recent years and the pattern is only continuing now in 2019 and 2020 that China really pulled ahead not just from the EU but also from the domestic market within Brazil however what our data also show and been able to discriminate the differences in sourcing patterns of major buyers whether they be companies or countries if we look in from the perspective of relative risk hectares of deforestation per ton of soy imports then what we find that the imports into Europe corresponded to a doubling to a double the relative deforestation risk of imports to China and that same pattern over the last decade and that pattern has only changed in 2018 and that pattern was also the same of imports of argentinian soy where Europe has been historically exposed to higher levels of relative risk although it's the inverse for beef where much of the deforestation risk associated with Brazil's beef exports the largest exporter of beef in the world is just in for China and with that we'll turn now I'll hand to my colleague Helen Belfield to take us through the next section of findings starting with hotspots and risk in commodity supply chains over to you Helen. Thanks Tori so deforestation and emissions are linked to the production of commodities is concentrated in specific regions and therefore sourcing patterns of matter in terms of the risk exposure of commodity buyers so this map here shows the greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation linked to beef exports from Brazil and you can see that they're concentrated in the amazon region and therefore buyers sourcing from such high risk areas have up to 10 times the emissions risk exposure than average this pattern of risk concentration in a fraction of the supply chain is seen across all of the trade share but commodities so more than 50 percent the deforestation risk linked to commodity exports is from less than five percent of the producing regions so this visual here shows the cattle deforestation risk linked to Brazilian beef exports for each of the cattle producing municipalities so each circle is a represents a municipality and the darker color red municipalities and the ones to the right hand side have height the highest risk exposure and this pattern of a handful of high risk regions is consistent for Indonesian palm oil exports shown here as well as for Brazilian soy exports here and across the other commodities so for these soy exports these high risk municipalities are concentrated in the Matapiba region which in 2018 accounted for 77 percent of China's imported deforestation risk but only nine percent of its supply from its Brazilian soy imports so this pattern of risk concentration is also seen at the farm level so a recent trade study shows that 80 percent of illegal deforestation on soy farms in Matagosso that took place in only two percent of the total farms so shifting to commodities we again see this pattern of risk concentration so we've seen from Toby how cattle pasture expansion is the largest driver of deforestation in Latin America so trace data shows that beef exports have high deforestation risk and the ton of meat Brazilian beef exports have a thousand times a deforestation risk for Brazilian chicken exports but not all beef is the same risks are concentrated in products and in regions for example live cattle exports from Brazil have five times the deforestation risk per ton than other products such as processed beef and this is due to the fact that they're mainly sourced from our states in the Amazon similarly we can see that Paraguayan beef exports are associated with nine times the deforestation risk per ton than Brazilian beef exports so in addressing these risks many traders have made zero deforestation commitments and trace allows us to identify gaps in the coverage of these commitments across not only the companies but also the production regions so firstly looking at production regions we can see that Indonesian palm oil exports have the highest coverage of zero deforestation commitments of more than 80% followed by soy exports from Latin America with the coverage of beef exports lagging far behind and strikingly no exports of Paraguayan beef are covered by public zero deforestation commitment despite their incredibly high risk this data from Brazil for both beef and soy hides the discrepancy as well that the Amazon has a far higher coverage of its exports by ZDC commitments due to collective commitments such as the soy moratorium and the G4 cattle agreement um the Mr Hardo although this gap is closing with new commitments by companies such as JBS and Glencore so while many of the largest traders do have zero deforestation commitments although they don't always extend across all biomes and geography and countries trace data also shows that there's a number of smaller companies with high deforestation risk per tonne that don't have commitments so this visual here so each of the circles represents a company exporting in this case Brazilian beef and the size of the circle indicates the deforestation risk per tonne of that company's exports the larger the circle the larger the risk the higher the risk per tonne and if the circles on the right hand side indicate the level of risk above the average which you can see is the dotted line in the middle so those companies in red which indicates they don't have a commitment on the right hand side have relatively high exposure per tonne and this pattern is consistent across soy exports from Brazil as you can see here as well as soy exports from Argentina and also from Paraguay so trace data as well as looking at gaps in coverage it enables us to assess the risk exposure of companies with commitments and those without so here you can see the deforestation risk per thousand tons of committed companies which are the green circles and non-committed companies which are the red circles for each of the commodities that trace covers and you can see the average risk of committed companies as a line in green and the average risk of non-committed companies as a line in red and while it's important to recognise that many of these commitments are recent and there's also some companies without public commitments may be taking action currently we're not able to see a clear difference in the risk exposure of committed and non-committed companies so going forward we'd expect to see over time the risk of committed companies declining as they implement their commitments so I hope we've given you a flavor of the key findings and the highlights from the yearbook there's a lot more content to explore at trace.earth but in some way that the main message really is that risks linked to commodity production and exports are highly concentrated whether that's in production regions traders markets or products and this really provides a tangible entry point for targeted action to address these risks so please do use the yearbook let us know how you're using it and give us feedback for how we can improve it going forward and many thanks and I'll hand back over to Anna. Thanks Toby and thanks Helen that was really really useful and we have a few questions from from our viewers already just most of them are just kind of clarifying points so one of them is does this data show the distinction between legal and illegal deforestation so I can help answer these ones quickly not in all cases we are looking at that in certain instances and we'd like to do it more we have more detailed work on that in Brazil on how we compute shall I just run quickly through the questions Anna yeah yeah go for it to not take too much time I won't go into detail on the method there is a detailed methods documentation on the website at trace.earth about methods please do ask us for more detail and do I understand correctly that exports to you are more likely to be associated to do for us into China yes during the last decade changing for soy it is not the case for beef and the reason is because on average historically Europe is sourced from high deforestation risk regions same question on illegality and can you name the companies responsible for the biggest red balls all the data that you've seen has the detail behind it within the yearbook so you can go in you can look at the charts those charts are interactive you simply need to have your mouse over them to get the name of the company of course the raw data can also be downloaded from our site with that I'll pass back to you Anna thank you for the questions so I just had a couple of questions as well so one of them is related to what one of our viewers asked so you say that the deforestation risk of soy from from China is lower than that from the EU and yeah as you as you outline that's to do with where they source from the EU sources tends to source from higher risk areas but have you been able to identify whether that's to do with for example a specific sustainability commitment that Chinese companies or the Chinese state has when it comes to soy or if not to do with commitments is there is there anything at play apart from chance so it's not it's not chance I mean the critical qualifier here is that we're talking about relative risk explosion so this is hectares of deforestation per tonne of imports China imports by far the most amount of soy and beef from Brazil in doing so it's also associated with the largest amounts of absolute deforestation risk explosion but it's important in the same way that we look at per capita measures for carbon footprints that we also look at the intensity of deforestation impacts associated with supply chains and historically because I mean one of the key drivers is because Europe's proximity to northern Brazil is a factor but also historical relationships and contract agreements and that is despite stronger sustainability commitments historically in Europe than in China but that pattern is starting to change okay that's really helpful and and just one other thing I wanted to pick up on Toby from your presentation you said that there'd been an increase in soy production without a correspondingly large increase in deforestation in the past few years and I'm wondering if you have a kind of sense of why what's made that possible is that is that to do with commitments that companies have made so depends on where we're looking so deforestation for soy directly for soy in the Amazon has gone down to extremely low levels thanks to the success of the soy moratorium in the Brazilian Amazon deforestation for soy in the Sahado remains quite high we're estimating about 100,000 hectares in 2018 but it's a lot lower than what it was a decade ago and the reasons for that are many a lot of the accessible areas have been cleared but also a concern and attention towards this issue has gone up in recent years in the Sahado so the the attention not only of markets and campaigners but of companies themselves has shifted more to this by which is critical because in relative terms it's much more threatened than the Amazon great okay and I just want to remind all of the attendees that later on there's going to be a Q&A session so please send questions as we're going along and as we hear from the other panelists and at the end I'll try to ask as many of them as I can there's a Q&A box so you can just write in there and so I'm now going to give the floor to Francis Seymour who's senior fellow at the World Resources Institute well hi everyone let me start by congratulating Toby and Helen for this amazing achievement you guys just go from strength to strength I just want to make three quick points based on this presentation and the year book the first is to express really deep appreciation for the actionable insights that are contained in this data and analysis I think we all you know come into this with a sense of the broad outlines of the problem you know Brazil as the 800 pound gorilla is a producer country thief as the big deforestation commodity China as the rising importance of a market you know choke points of a few traders but what this does is take it to a whole new level of granularity and combinations among those different factors that really provide no excuse for whether you're a company or a financier or a government or an advocate to really have a much better targeting towards where as Helen put it the risk is concentrated so really just express appreciation for that and in particular I saw in the executive summary of the report this more focus on the carbon intensity of the commodities coming from different sourcing regions and I think that's going to be really important as companies increasingly include land sector emissions in their climate reporting and net zero commitments and all that and so I really think that's a it's really an important dimension that you guys are effectively bringing out. The second point I want to make is to express a sense of disappointment I think that everyone shares that we're not seeing more of a signal from the zero deforestation commitments in terms of reducing risk on the the part of companies that have made those commitments and I guess part of it is you know a need to tell myself be patient because it just takes time to put all this into place and I commend to all of you a recent blog by Leo Fleck of the Moore Foundation that kind of details this architecture that's being put into place and sort of makes the argument that we're now poised to to move to a whole new era of accountability so hopefully we'll see that signal sooner rather than later. I'm particularly interested also and hope to see in future data some distinction between those jurisdictions where companies are proactively engaging to be part of the solution and again need to be patient because a lot of these are really just now getting off the ground but I I take heart from what may be plausibly a preliminary signal from the GFW data from Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire suggesting you know a significant drop in primary tree cover loss in 2019 which happens to coincide with when the Cocoa and Forest Initiative both government and private sector actions really you know started to get subtraction so so maybe we can find more inspiration for similar public-private collaborations at jurisdictional scale and informing initiatives like the VSA initiative that's trying to really you know marshal committed buyers and in particular places um my last point is sorry i'm got my buzzer going off my last point is just to remind everyone that as valuable as this data is all of it comes from an era before any of us had ever heard of COVID-19 and so it does not yet capture the direct and indirect impacts of the the pandemic or the associated economic crisis or the responses to that crisis and I think we can learn some lessons from the Asian financial crisis about you know the boom in commodity production that can often follow you know an economic crisis and some of the perhaps perverse policies that we've already seen some governments putting into place so I just encourage everyone to think hard about what the likely implications of this pandemic and economic response are likely to be to monitor for those impacts and do everything we can to influence the trajectory because the decisions that are made in the coming months are going to influence what the state is going to tell us next year and in years to come thank you thanks a lot francis that was really helpful and so now we're going to be hearing so I've got questions but i'm going to leave my questions for the end and we'll be hearing from Deborah Diaz who's sustainability manager at the consumer goods forum over to you Deborah thanks Anna can you hear me okay yeah yeah we can hear you fine great uh first I wanted to thank uh the team for inviting me to speak on this webinar like francis I commend all of the hard work that's gone into into the tool and the additions to the tool which I feel are quite significant and as again as francis said provide actionable items and look forward to learning more as things go live uh so a bit of context about the cgf uh since many from this group might not be familiar with us uh we're a membership organization of consumer goods companies for ceo leg um and we bring together uh about 250 to 300 retailers and manufacturers of the consumer goods industry among other other actors uh many of you might be familiar with a resolution we published in 2010 on helping to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020 uh well we are at 2020 and uh it became clear to us over time that we wouldn't be where we wanted to be in 2020 and we really needed to step up action um and the way that we're doing this is building coalitions of action of willing companies leading companies who want to take this work forward and really accelerate action um to address a number of issues so we now have a forest positive coalition of action that has 17 member companies and makes of retailers and manufacturers and we're working on a strategy that falls under a theory of change we developed over 18 months a couple of years ago with a number of experts and in particular two elements of that theory of change that we feel um we as an industry and as a speaker leading companies agree with this on Deborah we're we're losing you a little bit I don't know whether it's same for everyone but I wonder if you could speak up just a little bit because I can't hear you very well can you hear me better now yeah that's a bit better okay sorry about that I'm not sure what point you lost me uh but I was bringing up the new theory of change and the two elements that uh two rather three elements that we really want to focus on to do better um at addressing deforestation on a global scale so this is put into two areas supply chain management moving from deforestation or conversion free supply by individual companies to deforestation or conversion free businesses across our suppliers businesses and also the second element the integrated land use approach where we want to help move from siloed and uncoordinated initiatives integrated multi stakeholder land use and bringing consumer goods companies closer to what's happening on the ground we're still working on the same three commodities we work on in the past palm oil soy and capable hand packaging and we have a steering committee and working groups for each of these commodities um I wanted to give this context because the trace data um is very relevant to the work that we're doing um we actually have some history with race we had a built a coalition called the soy buyers coalition a project which looked to link the supply chains of a collective of cgf companies with race data understand where we should focus our efforts so we had a partnership with race and pro for us to work on this uh the soy buyers coalition no longer exists in its former form it's now been rolled into the work that we're doing and we're exploring how best to leverage what we've learned through that project um I think some of the things that we learned then and seeing the data that um that's been shared today uh I think greater transparency around flows and environmental impact could help companies and collectives such as ours to identify the specific actors and regions that require attention and this is relevant both from a supply chain management approach and integrated landscapes approach and it's also interesting to see the focus on other geographies we tend to concentrate a lot of our work on specific companies like indonesia and brazil for obvious reasons um but for commodities like soy people can packaging it and beefs beef impacts aren't only concentrated in any one country or region and I think this greater visibility helps us determine where we can focus our efforts um linking data to the carbon footprint is also I find quite interesting um I mentioned that there were two elements that we want to focus on in our work I think a third element that doesn't really fall into the levers of change that we identified is the this point around transparency and greater accountability that's something that we need to do better um through our work and um it's been a challenge over time to find meaningful data that can link our actions to change on the ground um having carbon footprinting data um is I mean besides the obvious interest for companies looking for reduced carbon footprint it helps provide a more direct way to measure impact potentially um I mean we've seen improvements in relation to palm for example and paper pulp and packaging in relation to deforestation um but it's difficult to tell if and where we were able to make an impact and that's not just um because it makes for um a good story um to show that we are having impact but it also helps us to understand what is there isn't working in the work that we do and tools like trace help us get closer to the point where we can connect our actions to change on the ground especially when it comes to things like things like supply chain approaches there are a few limitations I do see um for the individual companies there isn't yet an out of the box way to connect trace data and link to their individual supply chains I think trace works best when the data can be used by collectives um of companies or other actors um but there are many companies out there that also want to understand their own supply chains and um find the the prospect of tracing commodities quite daunting obviously trace isn't the only tool out there to do this but it couldn't hold the potential for it and I think one last point is um there's a limitation around the age of data at the age of the data the more recent data the better especially when it comes to anticipating risks uh that's all for me great thank you Deborah that was that was really helpful um we've now got Nicole Polstera who's Sustainable Consumption and Production Campaigner at Fern hello is this working yeah that's perfect okay great thank you very much um yeah first of all I also wanted to congratulate the whole team behind trace to make this type of information available in its granularity and accessible to all so that civil society groups and policy makers can monitor for themselves deforestation and commodity flows so fantastic my following remarks I would like to point out that we do them through the prism of looking purely at EU policies I personally work more on Latin America and soya and beef so um please see my remarks in in this light so I think this um yearbook comes out very timely in with this level of detail for at least four reasons in the EU context one is that the European Commission is just kicking off its stakeholder process this autumn and how to deal with the imported deforestation and how to protect forests worldwide there were some other policies that this yearbook is relevant to such as the EU farm to fork strategy which has recently been released and the ongoing reform of the common agricultural policy and obviously soy is uh important to that one uh secondly this is very important uh to see that this type of information is accessible and can be made available because the EU is thinking about creating an observatory and I think it shows that an independent science-based observatory is actually already existent so this should definitely be used um I would also like to encourage maybe the people who attend to look at what's going on in France and in in France a stakeholder group and the French national strategy has already used the trace data to come forward with a suggestion on how an alert mechanism and how an observatory for soya going to the EU could work I'm happy to share um the link to the relevant campaigner in France in the chat later on I would also like to point out with relation to observatory um that I would find an observatory on land tenure issues and indigenous peoples right as relevant as a deforestation observatory such as trace uh thirdly it's very timely um because Germany has just taken on the president presidency yesterday it presented its own strategy but it's also very timely because Germany is pushing very hard to ratify the mercury trade agreement so it's good to have more data on soya and beef coming into the EU and fourth and my last point on why trace is very important to come out now is because especially um this information is spreading about deforestation in Brazil as the tension rises and Mercosur could become a reality very soon so for all those four reasons uh congrats that this level of information comes out now so I'm looking at my watch if I still have a little bit of time and if I do I would like to point to three figures in this report that I think are very important to know in the EU context that were presented in the executive summary so one is that the EU has this high in uh deforestation risk in its commodities relative to to China or at least has had it for the past decade and we'll see how how that changes or not secondly that Spain among the EU countries is um has the highest greenhouse gas footprint related to its soya and third third that most deforestation linked to soya in Matugrozo is actually illegal so why are these three three figures so key so one is um because we are always often told or asked so is the EU at all relevant if we look at the the levels of imports that go that China does and I would say yes with the high deforestation risk per per commodity per hectare yes we see it's clearly still has a role the EU to play secondly um Spain with its high greenhouse gas footprint and it's not a signatory to the Amsterdam declaration so that that is really a pity and we hope that this will really put pressure on Spain to be more engaged on the issue and thirdly this is important as the European Commission has currently a process going on with assessing two types of regulation one on corporate company behavior more generally and the second one assessing options on reducing the risk of imported deforestation so congrats again on making this available and I hope we'll see this yearbook for many more commodities to come thanks a lot Nicole that was perfect timing so we have our final speaker who is Alice Thule a deputy director from Instituto Centro de Vida ICV so I will hand over to you Alice thank you can you hear me well yeah yeah we can hear you we can see you so good morning everyone here it's 10 30 in the morning so first I would like to be to begin saying how happy I am to be part of this the launching of such interesting data and to be partnering with such a great partner as Trace thanks for for the opportunity and I think my this my role here is to represent a Brazilian national organization ICV I guess the best way is to show to show you how initiative such as Trace are fundamental you know a mission to reduce deforestation and to establish a low carbon development pathway so our context in Matagrosso is quite a good example of what is happening at Latin America today we have a fair concentration of challenges but I think are well described in the in the first part of the yearbook we have despite the the dropping of deforestation 10 years ago we have we are still dealing with agriculture expansion and a direct impact of deforestation and and at the same time we do have government and private actual commitments there are deforestation commitments so moratorium and the meat agreement from the federal prosecutors we in Matagrosso there is the PCI strategy which is a specific strategy to reduce deforestation and reduce the climate change impact at state level so we are those commitments but as the as the the yearbook stressed very well there is no discernible impact on the reduction of deforestation last year we had the highest rate of deforestation since 2011 so and and since there were the question on that I think it's it's interesting to know that is 90% illegal so we the question of legality and illegality in Brazil is rather not so important and so those data clearly show that commitments are not enough. I would say that we need to be patient but if commitments are necessary they are not enough today so the question is at some point what do we do next and at ICB our answer has been to try to make public and private decision makers accountable to their commitments so that's showing that it's not okay to have a illegality in your supply chain consumer will react and we had today a very clear reaction from a Norwegian company of the assignment and on reacting on soy and it's not okay to say that you're sourcing of of deforestation free if you cannot prove it because as we as the the data matter also illegality of deforestation for soy for the soy sector shows deforestation still is still illegal in in the soy sector and it's very limited to some of the of the property so it's important that traders and private actors have a specific tool and specific way to show it that if this is kind of their responsibility so there is a need a global need to build this chain of reaction and so that bank, funders, consumers can play a role in decision making and that's why I think this type of data published by the crazier book are so interesting and so important because it's it helps us to build the story to to collectively increase the perception of risk of deforestation and it's not only a risk of reputation but it needs to be a risk of market so with transparency with data analysis with storytelling and visualization it's and I think we do have key elements to show the state of responsibility and and to to be able to perform and to to implement accountability on that. Thanks a lot Alice that was really really interesting points that you made and I had one question that I wanted so we're opening up the the discussion now to questions both from myself if you guys panellists have questions for each other and also for those who've been watching to to ask their own questions so we've got a few already but if you have more questions that you'd like to ask can you can continue to write them in the q&a box now and so one question I wanted to ask is that a big focus of this year but your book seems to have been on really trying to target the specific areas and sectors which have the very high levels of deforestation risk and I'm wondering from a journalist's perspective do you think we need to kind of consider applying less generalized language to deforestation so kind of pivoting away from the fires in the amazon destruction of the amazon by farmers to to deforestation in certain areas of the matapuba region specifically for you know live catalex for that that kind of thing do you think that we have a bit of a responsibility to make that the areas of focus clearer who are you asking Anna um maybe Toby I think probably I'll be asking you um so it depends on the audience I think um because for some the issue in the most general terms is new so there's always a space for that but my gut reaction is yes I think in order for reporting to be more tied to action and to guide where the action is needed and we do need to be more specific and a lot of the reporting last year around the amazonian fires it brought a lot of attention to to the issue but it was incredibly broad brush and incredibly blunt um and it ended up tiring basically everyone who was somehow linked to brazil is necessarily being linked to the amazon and therefore necessarily being linked to fires um and that doesn't get you very far um so we do need to be more strategic because there are good actors out there and there is progress being made and until such time as we can better discriminate where the problem is and where it isn't and who needs to do more and who's already showing progress then we won't be able to understand when progress is really being achieved thank you thanks for that Toby um Francis I wanted to ask you so you mentioned that towards the end of your section that that it's really important that we realize that data was compiled pre-covid and I'm wondering what you outlined a couple of things but I'm wondering what you think some of the effects that of COVID we should look out for are um yeah that's my question I guess the one I would highlight is that um there will be momentum on the part of governments wanting to stimulate economic recovery and create jobs and all of that is is understandable and so our job is to elevate to deforestation risk into those conversations whether they're in the context of you know national level discussions on recovery packages or lending from multilateral development banks to support them to make sure that we don't repeat mistakes of the past in terms of bailing out uh companies that have unsustainable business models and highlighting the equity impacts of different ways of solving this problem in terms of investing in green jobs versus other alternatives or dealing with the household distress that may result from the economic crisis with conditional cash transfers rather than you know supporting industries that that drive deforestation so um I know I have and could have go through a list of 10 different things that we could be focusing on but in general job number one is to get forests into these discussions because right now they're still kind of in a footnote or in an afterthought or a sort of second or third order consideration but they need to be front and center of the discussions. Great thanks for that Frances. So I've got a few questions here now from from attendees um so one from uh uh someone called Jules and although exports only represent about 20 percent of total production are the 80 percent of beef produced and consumed in Brazil linked to similar or lower or higher levels of deforestation risk I guess that would probably go to to Toby. Yep um the first thing I would say because this number is often banded around and it diminishes the importance of the exports Brazil is still the world's largest exporter of beef not many countries export a lot of beef because it's mostly consumed domestically um the short answer question is the production of um beef the domestic market on average is associated our data show with higher levels of deforestation than exports and that quite interestingly is the same across biomes and one of the consequences that that has and there is there is a short report on this inside the yearbook um that when demand for Brazilian beef exports goes up as it does do in response to a lifting of a ban from the EU due to a state becoming as foot and mouth free or China authorizing more slaughterhouses to import from or the US lifting a ban on fresh meat imports wherever that happens we can expect an increase in deforestation linked to those increases in exports because they're needing to take the extra supply from the regions that were otherwise supplying the domestic market which on average are linked to more deforestation and evidence for that comes if we look historically when the the fresh meat ban was lifted in the US in 2017 temporarily then there was a marked spike in deforestation linked to beef imports into the US from Brazil great thanks Toby um so we we've had various questions um on the the zero deforestation commitments um which as Francis said on the face of things might seem a little bit concerning and so one one person has asked are you saying that it doesn't matter whether companies have a commitment or not in terms of their risk exposure or in terms of the actual deforestation in their supply chains further on that so um Trace measures the deforestation risk exposure of companies um linked to the production regions that they source from um we're not able to link deforestation impacts per say two company supply chains because we don't map down to the farm level um so that's the first thing in terms of the deforestation risk exposure of companies that have commitments or don't have commitments at the moment there is no difference in their risk exposure but many of these commitments are new particularly outside of the amazon biome a lot of the commitments have been made in 2016 2017 2018 and there's more commitments being made um this year as well so we may not be expect to see a difference yet as Francis said we'd expect we need to be patient and over time we'd expect to see a decline in the deforestation risk of companies with commitments as they're implementing those commitments great thanks Helen um someone has asked did did Francis Seymour refer to VSA as in verified sourcing areas and can she elaborate on the use of jurisdictional landscape uh approaches and where when how she considers these could be effective great question um I can only answer briefly um I am most familiar with the initiatives underway in indonesia um many of which are at the district level Kabupatins where um a number of of the district heads have committed to green development and are being supported by a round table that that links them together um and there are a number of such districts that have sort of either multi-stakeholder processes to bring companies government civil society together to try to shift land use trajectories in some cases the private sector has grouped together separately so for example in the district of Siak this is one that is showing some prowess of of actually having an action plan to move ahead but I hasten to say that all these are very early days in that um in many of the jurisdictions around the world where these groups are coming together you know it's like this they're in the first year of implementing action plans and so again that's why I was saying we sort of need to be patient and and give them time to actually have an impact on the trajectory of forest loss um but if we don't see it soon we need to revisit um but I but I do see some some promising experience experiments going on around the world great thank you um that is all we have time for in terms of questions but we have several more via email and also um in this chat box so we're going to endeavor to answer or not me but the trace team are going to endeavor to answer all of those questions via email um so you can expect those so I just want to thank everyone who joined on behalf of the trace team and the organizers are going to be distributing a recording of the webinar to all of the participants and invite you to explore some of the yearbook content on insights dot trace dot earth thanks a lot everyone thanks to all the panelists you're great thanks guys thank you bye