 Thank you very much for coming. We really are thrilled to be able to convene this session between SEI and GCP and have such a stellar panel that's going to contribute some reflections around what is clearly a critical issue. We're in a juncture in all sorts of ways. We're in a juncture in terms of the fate of tropical forests. We're in a juncture in terms of levels of aspiration and interest, let's say, not even saying commitments at this stage of responses to the challenges. And we're also at a juncture in the kinds of tools and approaches that are being deployed, that are being developed, that are being put on the table to try and seize the moment and turn this situation around. And one of them is a better understanding as to how supply chains work. Information that can provide a more transparent view of the way in which actors across the world are connected to landscapes across the tropics and therefore hold some kind of shared interest, if not shared responsibility, shared stake in the fate of these landscapes. And that's the starting point for potentially transformative change. Now what we're focusing on in this session is looking at how can we harness the kinds of information that are being made available to track and monitor the performance, not only of companies that have been more visible in making big commitments to cut, eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, but increasingly governments and also other actors. So we're going to speak to some of the critical gaps that exist in the information that's currently available. We're going to speak to some of the key kind of architectural features that need to be put in place in order for this system to work because it's not enough that we have parallel systems that look on the one hand at how companies are performing in isolation of the jurisdictions and the territories and the countries in which they're connected. Those two things are interdependent. The fate of a landscape in Brazil or in Indonesia is determined in part by the changing, the shifting performance of the downstream actors and supply chain actors that are connected to that landscape. So it won't work for us to have parallel systems that assess the performance and motivate these two, hitherto quite parallel efforts to connect to change on the ground because at the end of the day it's change on the ground of course that needs to be visible. And we're going to also speak to some of the profound risks and uncertainties in how this system is deployed. If one monitoring and performance system is put in place before another, that brings certain implications. If we have a system of jurisdictional indicators, jurisdictional performance, that brings within a risk of course that poor performing areas will be blacklisted and embargoed at exactly the places that need investment by good actors who are wishing to step up and make a change will not happen. If certain companies that are at the forefront establish their own system to protect and firewall their own supply chain at the expense of others also being able to do the same in time, that itself will also bring risks of potentially bifurcating the system and having a twin track solution to the problem that again will not drive the changes that we need on the ground. So we're going to cover that canvas of issues and we're going to do so in a number of different ways. The first of which is to involve you all in getting your perspective as to how much optimism and pessimism there is in the room and to do that we're using a tool called Slido. Now I don't know how many of you have got your phones open or a computer open, but if you have then go to slido.com or sli.do either one or just google Slido and then type in, you'll get to this screen and then just type in zero deforestation into the hashtag and then click on join. You can do this on your phone or you can do it on your computer. Can I have a minimum show of hands of who's managed to get this far? Yep, yep, okay, great. So there's the first question. Just to get a little flavour in the room. Do you think that companies will be able to deliver on their zero deforestation commitments? So obviously there's lots of riders and caveats to that, but just to get a sense of what your gut feeling is, yes or no. So if you vote then you'll start to see, so I'm going to be positive about this and I'm going to vote yes and I'm going to click on send and then you can see the response is coming in. So and you can see that it's live and if you want to influence the outcome then you could look at the screen while you vote. So there's quite a lot of pessimism interested in it. So last week at the launch event for our platform Trace, Sarah's going to prevent momentarily and it was exactly this answer which is... This was something that just cached me. All right, so how many votes is that? That will do. That gives us a sense. Oh it's got back down. More optimism in the room later. Some people can't get on my phone, but that's enough. About the same. It was more pessimistic earlier. People thought maybe that's not the mood we should have for this event, so they're optimism. So if we go back to another question, let's see if it's the same. Roy can we change questions? Okay, now it's from the Wi-Fi slow, maybe if we just crashed it. The second question is to see if this works. Do you think that governments are going to be able to deliver on their zero deforestation commitments? Same answer, yes or no? Let's just get a quick poll and just to see whether it's the same. Don't let your previous answer influence your first. Well I'm going to maintain positive optimism. Oh wow. So that's interesting in and of itself. A lot less optimism around how governments are going to perform. I mean that's something that maybe the panel can think about in their reflections. So without further ado, what we're going to do is we're going to have contributions by our panel and we're going to have a presentation of a new transparency platform that GCP and SEI launched last week called Trace. Transparency for Sustainable Economies that Sarah will give a run through. But we're going to kick off with a presentation from Charlotte Biscayne who is the founder and director of Climate Focus and was leading the work on the New York Declaration of Forest Assessment, the Assessment Coalition on Goal 2 on the performance of companies in delivering on their supply chain commitments under the New York Declaration. And that will set the scene following which we'll have a presentation from Sarah on the platform following by which we'll then have reflections from Rod and from Francis and then turn to you all. And now whilst we're doing that you can use a slide of the internet continues to perform. You can use that to type in a question something that sparks your interest that somebody said or that you thought of and we can add that and you can vote them. So if you type in something here, so if I type in a question then you can click send and you can it's pending so Roy here won't allow stupid questions like this to be approved. He's approved that one and then you can vote it up if you think it's a good question. And that will be just a nice way for us to capture some of the ideas in the room. So without further ado please come and sit at the front if you're standing at the back because we've got lots of room here. They don't want to, they want to wait and see if it's not interesting enough and then they might leave. That's a challenge. So I'm going to remind our panellists that we have ten minutes each and Steve here will be helping with enforcement for you. And he'll wave when you've got three minutes left and he'll wave again when you've got one minute left and I won't say what it will be when you've got nine minutes. Over to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm very glad when you came to the point that Roy is controlling the questions. I was wondering, you know, do you like her skirt? Do you like her funny English accent? Because there's all kind of things that one can make. Thank you. Thank you to the Stockholm Environment Institute. Thank you to Global Cannabis Program. Toby Sarah and the whole team are inviting me to speak. I will present more maybe the problem and the solution. So the event is nicely structured in a way that it goes more and more from the first speaker to the solution towards the end. So we leave you on a positive optimistic note. We're actually starting off off pretty negative. Oh yeah, so maybe we have a peak in optimism. So what I do, I'm coordinating a coalition which is the New York Declaration Assessment Coalition. And we publish an annual report on progress towards meeting the goals of the New York Declaration. The New York Declaration was adopted in 2014 by 190 governments sub-national and national private sector companies NGOs and indigenous people. And it formulates 10 goals which reach the old marching goal is to eliminate topical deforestation by 2030. So the loss of natural forest by that date. But then it has 10 goals that reach from restoration goals and includes the goals and formulates even more from the ambitious goal that the board challenge speaks to finance, governance and also to the drivers of deforestation. And agriculture, industrial agriculture, basic needs of poverty, fuelable subsistence, agriculture, but also other economic sectors. So it is a very comprehensive instrument and it was launched with a lot of publicity and one of the laws of the New York Declaration was that it came without any institutional backing, institutional follow up. And then there is a risk of these declaration and pledges that once the spotlight is turned off and people went to the CEOs and the governments went home, then it goes into a drawer and it is being forgotten and nothing happens. And in order to see that not happening so to avoid this and a coalition of things that research organizations came together, which includes WWF, SCIs, GDP, CDP, Woods Hole Institute Forest Plan. So it is a very credible high-powered group that works now together and publishing the annual reports with a goal to hold the endorser of the New York Declaration accountable, not only the endorser of the New York Declaration, particularly at the end of it, but also the whole world really. And so we have published this year the second annual update on Goal 1 to 10 and we have published a deep dive focus report on Goal 2. And Goal 2 is the one that I will speak now about in the next five minutes, which is the private sector goal. So it is the goal that says that all endorsers to the New York Declaration should support private sector efforts to eliminate deforestation from major agricultural supply chains by 2020. And these major agricultural supply chains are Palm Oil, Beef and Woodpecker. These are also the big drivers of deforestation. So what we did now with our partners is we, and this is again partners, what we did with our partners, we convened and formulated an assessment framework. And this assessment framework goes from looking through the whole let's say the whole trajectory of implementing supply chain commitment from the actual pledge, so from the commitment to eventually the impact on the round. And these are our criteria that go through it and look at, okay, we need commitment, we need implementation, we need an enabling environment, that's where we look at the actors that are not the private sector, governments, finance because we quickly came to the conclusion that private sector alone cannot implement, and successfully implement the supply chain commitment. It is a multi-sector cooperation that is needed. And then we concluded with looking, okay, the impact what is all that activity translating to and what is the impact on the ground. We have formulated indicators for criteria and to the extent possible, we relied on existing data, so we took the data of various transparency initiatives, for transparency initiative, compiled them, compared them, analyzed them and brought them together to give us conclusions on the indicators where data is. As we will see, not all the indicators have data, we have complemented what we have and quantitative data was qualitative interviews, so we did reach out to all the private sector endorsers of the new architecture as well as the private sector members of the traffic and forest alliance and conducted roughly 30 interviews with people that in a more descriptive qualitative fashion explained to us how they see their success on meeting supply chain commitments. Now, what is the result? And we have, it's important we have put some of the reports outside. They may be gone, but it's all on the website, www.forestdeclaration.org, both the overall update report as well as the go-to report. Also the one on the website doesn't have the titles that the print version has. So one on the website is actually the one this went into print just so that we could take it to Marrakech. We had five days more to correct mistakes on the online version, so that's the one that is the authoritative one. So what are the, what is the main conclusions? We see commitments and we see the commitments, the pledges growing about roughly $300 in the last year from $300 and $307 to $415 in the last year. So there is a movement and there is the, at least the willingness to commit from the side of the private sector. As we then go through the different criteria and as we go to the actual impact on the ground, the activity decreases. I'm not saying that the private sector doesn't want, but it becomes more difficult to actually reduce deforestation and work on the level of the supplier, the plantation and the farm and most importantly also the data decreases. So we have a lot of pledges and we have less on compliance, we have little on monitoring and we have almost nothing on impact. So here we see that the commitments are increasing, most companies have done risk assessment and have adopted some sort of policy. That policy can be just saying we saw a certified palm oil by 2020. So it can be a very simple one, it can be a lot more involved and there we see very few companies have actually time bound action plans that formulate strategies on how to implement their commitments on the ground. We have monitoring, very few companies have spatially explicit data from where their source and what is going on. So that's where companies say yes, there is technology is developing, but it's hard for us, many of you believe further the retailers, it's hard for us to work with our suppliers, there is no information, they don't have information. So that's something where certainly technology and data can help. We know that there is comparative, we also little progress in the improvement of the enabling environment. So there is talk of governments to reduce deforestation, there's very little, what companies feel, see, can smell and touch in terms of improvements on the ground and we have nothing which tells us whether all that activity, everything is actually reducing deforestation. There is, and that's where trace and the work of global tourists which is so important that maybe in the next year we work towards something where we do have more data because at the moment we don't even know whether it goes into the right direction. Assuming that all the actors are trying and willing and intending we still don't have a plan. So that with that, I described the problem. You can download the report, read it and then get excited about next year's report. Thank you very much Shalithu. That sets the scene really superbly and it also sets the challenge very directly. You couldn't have been more to the point of saying that there really is nothing at the moment that can give us confidence as to how much progress is being made. Despite the optimism that there was earlier in the room just one, and watching Slido here just to keep the audience engaged I was intrigued by one question that an anonymous person posted. Your website shows no private sector partners. Do you think this is a problem? Do you think yes or no? No. Excellent. So if you think that no is an inappropriate response then bear that in mind for later. We also don't have government partners and we don't have any. So this is a purely civil society research organisation thing in civil society. We wouldn't accept government partners and we wouldn't accept private sector partners. So that's our independence in this. So moving smoothly across to my friend and colleague Sarah Lake from the Global Canopy Programme who is going to introduce the platform that we launched last Friday transparency for sustainable economies trace. Thank you Toby. Thanks for that excellent setup. Very well positioned. Part of what the problem is is that we know companies are making commitments, governments are making commitments and there's this enormous momentum for addressing deforestation from commodity production which is no indication of if these commitments are leading to impact. We have no connection between what the actors are committing to and what's happening on the ground. So what trace aims to do is to fill in that gap by better linking actors to the impacts on the ground through mapping of material flows. So I'm going to try and do a live demo but internet is already great so it's a huge risk always to do a live demo but we're going to try and do it and hopefully it works out. And so to begin with there we go. So to begin with this is where we are now in understanding commodity supply chains. On the left we have soy coming from Brazil and on the right we have all of the importing countries. So we have a general sense when we look at data that exists today that soy from Brazil is going largely to China and a number of other countries that are importing it for soy in the form of soy beans, soy pigs, oil, but also soy that's being consumed in Brazil for chickens and then being exported as such. What trace does is expand this especially to give granular data on the origin of the soy to better link it to the impacts on the ground. So we move from having this view to this view. We can now see at a municipal level scale where soy is produced and where it moves to in the world, as well as who it transfers through. So trace provides information on the specific actors in the supply chain through which the soy is passing. This level of granularity at the municipal level is necessary in order to improve decision making. You cannot make improved sourcing decisions if you don't know the specific areas you're working in, as well as the impact in those areas. So we move to the trace platform. At launch, we're focusing specifically on soy from Brazil as an initial proof of concept of the way in which we can demonstrate the use of this material mapping and a number of different decision support capabilities. But we can quickly expand to cover other commodity and geography linkages. So while we start with soy, we can quickly cover other materials, as well. And we'll be expanding to cover all the soy from Latin America then moving to cattle in Brazil and cattle from other Latin American countries and then moving to palm oil Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand as well as other deforestation risk commodities across different geographies, as well. If we go into the tool if we go into the tool we can see a detailed analysis of the material flows across actors and places So here we can see the material flows of over 70 million tons of soy exported from Brazil in 2015. Moving from the municipalities of production through the exporters to the importers and ultimately to the importing country. So we can see really quickly the major trainers that are involved, the municipalities where it's originating as well as the fact that it's going largely to China as well as a number of other countries From this somewhat simplified view we can also pull out individual strengths. We can look and say specifically what soy is going to Spain and who is it traveling through but we can also look at the other view and say what soy is coming from a particular place and going to Spain and narrow this particular view down to an even finer and finer strength The data underlying this is over 300,000 unique material flows and this will probably take a second to load because it's so much data but this is 300,000 over 300,000 unique material flows that map all of the soy. We have 100% coverage of soy exported from Brazil. So this gives us a boat granularity in terms of understanding where in Brazil the soy is coming from but also scale we have wall to wall coverage of the exports from Brazil to give us a complete picture of what's happening in the soy sector From here we can dig deeper. We know that within here there's some key actors like Cargill or Bungie who are major traders but if we want to dig further into their supply chain we can select Bungie here and zoom specifically to their supply chain So here's just Bungie. We look at Bungie's supply chain and we can see that they're sourcing that Primavera here is the municipality that is providing single handedly the largest amount of soy from a single municipality and then a lot of their soy is ending up in China What we can also do is then look at some of the sourcing area patterns and be able to see, for example what biome is Bungie sourcing from So this recolor is according to the biome in which they're sourcing from and here this pink block at the top represents the Sahado So we can see in fact that Bungie is sourcing a fair percentage of their soy from the Sahado We can go even further to look specifically at what this link to deforestation is So here are options for recoloring but we can resize so right now the thickness of the flow is colored or is scaled according to the volume but we can rescale it according to the amount of deforestation and specifically the amount of deforestation from soy Using data from our partners at Agro Satellite in Brazil we can see this is the deforestation specific from soy conversion in the Sahado So here we can see these municipalities at the top You can see them light up on the map as well in terms of where they're located in Brazil and we can see that these municipalities all fall within the Sahado but specifically within one region amount of people If we want to explore this more we can go to the geographic information within the map and here we have a number of different geospatial layers that allow us to get a better sense of what the impact on the ground is So for example we can look at the deforestation of soy so here's the deforestation rate and then we can look at soy production and if you look at this overlay here the darkest areas where you have the most deforestation as well as the most soy production and what we can see is if we look at these municipalities in the supply chain these all fall in some of the darkest areas So it gives you a really clear sense of the way in which this particular trader is with two specific municipalities as well as the impact in those areas We can also explore other types of indicators we have indicators on water on developments so a spectrum of different types of indicators not just looking at forests but the impacts that forests have on local communities and local landscapes If we go back to this particular municipality we can choose any of these municipalities and dig deeper into what's happening in this particular place So let's look at this particular municipality We dig in here and we get a quick fact sheet showing specifically what's happening in this one municipality You can see it's located in a particular state It's in the Sahado and how much of land there is occupied by agriculture but also what is the high level overview of the specific environmental and social indicators in that place as well as who else is operating there So we know that Bungie is sourcing from here but we can also see that Cargill is one of the major players sourcing Cargill is sourcing accounts for 18% of the soy exported from this municipality We can then also say Cargill sourcing from here, where else are they sourcing from and switch between the perspective of places to this perspective of actors and be able to go between the iterating from place to actor to understand the linkages between them in the supply chain So here we can see some high level statistics on Cargill in terms of where they're sourcing from, where they're shipping to and then some of the sustainability indicators in those municipalities But what we really want to be able to do to answer this question of are actors implementing their commitments are we seeing improvement on the ground is be able to compare across the company So if we go back to the tool one of the key features of this is the ability to look at the overlay between commitments and deforestation So we can say here we recolor by do they have a soy deforestation commitment The colors are a lot but the bright yellow up here is yes they do so we know that Bungie, Cargill and ADM have commitments whereas other traders do not But then we can also overlay this with the amount of deforestation So to get a sense of is there in fact a correlation between the amount of deforestation in a company supply chain or in a municipality supply chain with the commitments that they have in place So we've done analysis offline of this as well so we've taken the data that powers trace and taken offline to show specifically the way in which this looks like if you take the municipalities with soy production and look at the coverage with the met municipality by a zero deforestation commitment and you can see so the red shows no coverage whereas the green shows greater coverage So to start giving you a sense of are we seeing improvements in the geographies that have higher coverage by zero deforestation commitments and you can see in some areas there's huge gaps where there's no coverage and if you look in the sahado that's outlined in the red dot you can see there's some coverage but there's still quite a lot of deforestation happening there to give you a sense of how this data can be extracted from trace and give you useful insights in terms of being able to support improved decision making So real quick the last piece here is just to highlight if we go back to the home page that this data is all open and free it's not downloadable at the moment simply because it's going to be just launched on Friday but it will soon be downloadable for everyone with the idea that this isn't simply a platform that's meant to be a platform is pretty and up there but really about getting the data in the hands of people who are making decisions and use this to support their efforts whether it's NGOs or researchers or financiers who are assessing risk in their portfolio So we have a number of different examples here of how we've used this data offline to conduct the example analysis as well as some ideas for how you can start exploring the tools we can look at T4 station hotspots I'll take you through the tool with some ideas for how to get started in particularly looking at some examples and we're curious to hear from you what types of user stories or what types of specific experiences are useful for you to understand the tools what stories do you want to be able to tell with this So with that I'd also like to thank the partners that have made this possible the website has developed partnership with visuality and the European Forest Institute as well as a series of funders who have generously made trades possible And Craig our friend from visuality is sitting here with us as well and our colleagues from many other partners are not here but just to say this is clearly an enormous ambition and we're only at the tip of the iceberg and this can only be accomplished through more partnerships with many other actors many of whom are in this room and we very much look forward to that and questions pinging in that we won't go through the answers of now but Sarah answered some of them that the data yes will be available it would somewhat contradict the name if we didn't make the data available But with that we're now going to move to our next panelist Rob Taylor who's just recently arrived director of the forest programme at WRI and is now overseeing the GFW platform Rob was formerly head of forest and WFW International so he comes with an extraordinary experience of looking at this issue from many different perspectives including what some of these commitments actually mean and the way in which they're interpreted and we've asked Rob to speak particularly about the way in which we can start to move towards a system that can track and understand both the performance of companies and the performance of the places and the territories and the jurisdictions that produce the products that the companies are trading and also the way in which tracking the interdependency of those relationships because until we can do that we're not going to get a handle on some of the drivers that are reshaping these supply chains for better or worse Rob thank you very much for joining us and the floor is yours Thank you I haven't got a PowerPoint so I don't know what I should say Justin I think it's really really exciting to see Trace there and I've been working on this issue for a long time and the trade part has always been the biggest black box and to see that opening up is really fantastic but the other side of my think is we're creating a virtual circle of transparency because as this data goes up it's not going to be perfect and if a trader or a company is shown in the wrong way that creates an incentive for them to put their own better data into the system and correct the story so you get this virtual circle of transparency which is really powerful and then with WRI and others we're also working on the more place-based aspects of this so you can start to really get more and more data layers pixel by pixel in a place so we're seeing much more transparency in terms of who owns farms who owns oil pump positions what is the land use change happening in and around those more and more granular detail more and more regular updates we have alerts now where deforestation is happening almost in near real time whether it's a regulatory authority or an NGO can investigate why that deforestation is happening then starting to connect it up to the kind of information in Trace so you have a whole new ball game in terms of transparency and there's less and less place for companies to hide who are doing the wrong thing but Toby posed a very simple question to me how do you monitor all this it's a very complicated question and the answer isn't simple and I think it really boils down to there's layers and layers of system boundaries in all of this so if you take kind of the narrowest system in all this it's the system around a very particular supply chain so you can now look at where this producer is when you can watch a commodity move through a particular supply chain and end up with a very specific end user whether it's a retailer or a big brand and that might be really interesting because that particular flow might be completely deforestation free but then if you broaden the system a little bit more broadly and say well hang on a minute who is that producer and maybe they're sending you a deforestation free commodity and maybe they've got another farm or another plantation somewhere else where they're sending somebody else a commodity that's very much linked to deforestation so going beyond one supply chain into several supply chains you might find that an actor has kind of a dual bad stuff to a market bad stuff to another market and then you can take it a step further in terms of corporate groups so if you I don't know in the round table sustainable palm world there's kind of an expectation that if you're a producer all your projects has to be certified but there's been enormous challenges and you get a whole corporate group to move on these issues consistently and so do you target a corporate group to have some parts of its operations that are deforestation free and other parts that are still troubled then you have the whole issue of deforestation free being if you like a single cause issue so we're only going to worry about deforestation free and stop at that point so if a company can demonstrate that it's not linked to deforestation is that the end of the sustainability story for them or are we going to explore more if I know about the labour conditions on their plantations are we going to ask other questions that go to broader issues of sustainability are they polluting the local river and so on so again the system boundary issue if we just worry about deforestation there could be many sustainability issues that get missed and this is where things like certification are interesting complement to the deforestation free issue because they do look generally a wider suite of issues then we have the whole supply chain things so the emphasis on this work in large parties on what happens at the start of supply chain what happens on the farm or in the plantation there are many problems in supply chains that can occur further down the supply chain we can have if we're looking at climate change impacts they can be impacts associated with processing or transport that far outweigh the impacts in the field we can also have labour issues further down the supply chain factories and so on so again is the system just what happens to the farm gate are we looking at the whole supply chain and how do we get transparency further down the chain then we have other sectors so at the moment the focus is on soy in trace and palm oil and beef and timber are all on the agenda for the New York debt profession but recently for example there's been a spate of deforestation in the Mekong linked to rubber so we can get leakage from one sector to another if we solve the problem in palm oil and then another sector can move in to become the driver of deforestation in an area we have time timing is a really tricky systems issue here because if we create a system where the day a company stops deforestation it's kind of in the good course we can create an incentive for a company to do as much deforestation as it can for as long as it needs to establish its production base and then it can stop and put their hands up and say hey I'm not deforestation anymore so we need to think about how far back in time we go is the hope growing on a forest that was converted five years ago deforestation free or not is it deforestation free if that conversion occurred ten years ago so these kind of questions the timing is very important and a lot of people say we should forget about the past but if we do that we create an enormous incentive to delay getting on board with these commitments for as long as possible and linked to that I think is the whole question of how companies deal with their legacies if a company has a deforestation free legacy I've always been an advocate that they shouldn't be off the hook until they do something serious about addressing that legacy there can be restoration there can be some kind of contribution to conservation to offset the harm and particularly on the social side a lot of the historical deforestation is really a major driver for social conflict and those conflicts are still there so just because the company is not deforestation anymore doesn't mean the social conflicts from the legacy have gone away so I think it's really important to look at legacy issues in this whole game then I think we move into the tricky forms of leakage the soy moratorium is famous for its impacts in Brazil but we might see leakages into other companies because that moratorium is so strong in one country that there's not the equivalent to another so that's another system boundary we need to take into account and then finally I think there's the whole issue of in many of these places in the deforestation for instance we really have a problem with poor governments companies can go only so far with voluntary commitments if the basic enabling conditions as was highlighted before aren't there and we really need to think is this really working to get governments thinking about issues like land tenure and more inclusive approaches development and this whole thing taking us towards achieving sustainable development goals at the same time as stopping deforestation so I think Francis is going to talk a little bit more about the link to governments but it would be a shame that companies do all they can with their private sector tools but this doesn't start to drive some of that governance that for example Redd is interested in so we really need to get the interaction between the voluntary private sector actions and what happens in the field to governments that's all I had to say I just think I think just to conclude I think we really have a problem here we're going whack-a-mole your whack-a-mole and the other one pops up over here so if we start just focusing on one mole and our system boundary we bang that one and nail it and we end deforestation in that province, that supply chain that sector the real danger isn't that a mole wakes up over here so the approach to monitoring and assessing success here you really have to think of the whack-a-mole what are the moles that are going to jump up and we have to be ready to monitor them as well thank you thanks very much Rob that was really really incredibly useful provocations on some of the quite profound challenges in perverse incentives and surprise moles that are going to pop up and I think it is really helpful to think about what are these different spheres of ambition or something like that where on the very local easy to reach level we've got consignments that we might think of as being certification free where you've got chain of custody linked to a certification scheme but obviously that's not in and of itself going to change things at scale and then you may have a company that may have some consignments that are clean and some that are not to what extent do you use the information about the fact that that company is involved in dirty consignments if you like to understand how it's performing how much is it fair and effective to use that information to leverage their change at scale and then taking it one step further how is it linking to actual change on the ground because the commitments that are out there by the companies that are capable and committed to delivering in the near term will definitely just lead to a whole load of moles popping up in lots of other places so we definitely are not there yet and on that question before giving the floor to Francis we have two more sliders for you to get a flavour of how much pessimism is there in the room actually about how many moles might pop up in the opposite places and I'm going to change to the screen head how many people are still managing to access this thank you Roy so first question this is a slightly more sophisticated question indicators of will indicators of jurisdictional performance for example deforestation run the risk of driving embargoes of poorly performing jurisdictions so this is a profound concern of many jurisdictions around the world that if they are the very places that need investment by committed and more sustainable actors in order to turn the system around then the worst outcome could be that everybody flees from them and they become a vacuum into which is sucked all of the bad guys and if you like so to get a sense of that I'm going to slightly agree but a little bit more uncertainty perhaps around that one than the risk of embargoes coming from jurisdictional indicators that may flag some areas as potentially being blacklisted well that gives a flavour just to get an idea of where people are in the room because there's a quite diverse range of actors and backgrounds I'm sure and with that I'm very pleased to turn the floor to Francis Timur who I'm sure many if not all of you know Francis is formally as many of you will know the director of C4 and currently at the Global Development Center for Global Development and is involved in a whole plethora of projects that are of profound relevance to this including advising the Packard Foundation and what they're doing around oil palm in Indonesia and involved in a number of different fronts and there's few people that can speak better I think to the relationship between what companies are doing and what governments are doing and what both need to do together supported by many other actors than Francis so Francis the floor is yours Thanks so much Toby so let me start out by just giving warm congratulations to SEI and GCP and the other partners present who are involved in producing this amazing book and I'm trying very hard to be gracious but I'm telling you it's difficult let me tell you why many of you know that one of the things I've been up to for the last couple of years is trying to write a book on you know why 4S why now to sort of make the case to those who haven't gotten the memo yet that 4S are important to climate agenda and development agenda you rock this is your cue coming soon thank you chapter 8 in this book is about the global commodity supply chains as a driver of deforestation and there's a footnote that mentions trace by the way we got it then but when we first started working on this we commissioned a paper for Martin Persson and his colleagues and based on his analysis of embodied emissions from deforestation of four major commodities in several countries we came up with this what we thought really cool infographic you know that shows the thickness of the arrows going from producer countries to particular regions well you know now this is like four steps ahead because the incredible granularity down you know below to the level of municipalities the greater specificity in the destination jurisdictions the identification of supply chain actors in the meantime and bringing the data up to date to 2015 so thanks a lot for rendering our book obsolete for more people ok but anyway seriously folks Google obviously is a critical one to help in the enterprise of implementing the commitments on the part of the companies as well as empowering the watchdogs and holding companies accountable for implementing their commitments I think as Charlotte's presentation made clear we're still a long way from doing either of those and this trace monitoring tool is going to be a big help but I think as was indicated in some of the voting results and we need to be honest with ourselves that even if it were successful that these commitments by the companies were implemented we don't have a very clear theory of change about how that would actually result in achieving the ultimate objectives one of which maybe not the only one is reducing deforestation overall and so as several speakers have already alluded to it is quite possible that individual companies could implement their supply chain commitments but that there would be leakage within and between jurisdictions and we've even seen some examples of this that even areas that are set aside by some companies in implementing their commitments are vulnerable to being reallocated to those who don't have such bombs or approached by other producers and I think it's fair to say that in the reasonable time frame there have been sensitive markets who are willing to buy those products and many of those markets certainly in the place I know best in Indonesia it's a domestic market that provides that and so we're not even having to talk about exports so for all of those reasons it's a concern about whether the supply chain commitments implementation on their own meet the effectiveness test but beyond that there was a C4 publication that all of a sudden took colleagues the so-called 3E framework is it effective, is it efficient, is it equitable and I think if we apply that framework to the commodity supply chain commitments we come up with problems on all three because as we've already discussed there's a question about effectiveness there's also a question about efficiency does it really make sense for every company in the commodity supply chains to invest in the traceability all the way down to the farm level is it realistic to think about certifying for example every individual of the millions of small holders that would need to be addressed in that kind of compliance regime and then there's the equity questions where again we've already seen some evidence that some companies in order to try to reduce risk will just cut out small holders from their supply chains because that's harder to control and then there are these sort of temporal equity issues that Rod alluded to about that a lot of these systems really just reward the people who got there first you know and so if you deforest it earlier you're okay but if you're a late owner sorry Charlie so there are a lot of issues in this whole approach so I think that for many of us that has led us to thinking about the potential power of the so-called jurisdictional approach and you know what are the ways to incentivize governments and particularly at subnational jurisdictions which are often the level of land use planning or permitting to really think about how a leverage improved performance at the scale of an entire political unit. Now it takes a lot of nerve for somebody at an event that has as its hashtag think landscapes to make this comment but I feel like I have to I want to be very clear that when I talk about jurisdictions I'm talking about political administrative jurisdictions that have elected political leadership with the authority to do things like enforce the law that is different from landscapes or supply sheds or ecosystems like watersheds that don't have that characteristic and so when I'm talking about jurisdictions I'm talking about political jurisdictions okay and I think that addressing these problems at the landscape scale has lots of benefits in that 3E framework because effectiveness you actually are covering wall to wall and it has the potential to deal with some of these cross commodity linkage issues. It's also presumably more efficient. I mean if you can imagine a world in which you can sort of certify an entire jurisdiction as producing deforestation free or other products that makes a lot more efficient for the producers in the supply chain. I also think it has the potential to be more equitable because it creates a political platform for for example indigenous peoples to make their claims to you know rights to land and seek redress for past legacy issues again that Rob mentioned and also potentially for governments to you know deal with companies about how they might deal with their legacy issues that may require actions outside the boundaries of their particular So anyway for all those reasons many people have come to the conclusion focus on the jurisdictional scale and my own limited involvement in this is through my work advising the Packard Foundation which has a strategy focused on trying to control palm oil driven deforestation and peatland conversion in Indonesia and that's really the basis of any expertise that I might claim to have. And so Packard Foundation is supporting a number of grantees which include for example the Earth Innovation Institutes work in Central Khaimantan TNC's approach in East Khaimantan to try to engage at this jurisdictional scale So what's the theory of change from the jurisdictional approach? It is because many of you in your voting you said well you actually have less confidence in governments meeting their commitments that you do in governments right so why do we think that there's any potential here and I think that very simplified there's a theory that a bundle of incentives can be presented to elected political leaders at the sub-national level that would be sufficient to tip them from business as usual deforestation to doing something different and implementing the kind of improved land use planning law enforcement that would need to take place to provide an enabling environment there also has the benefit of aligning with the jurisdictional scale of red finance which has been agreed in the context of the UNFCCC I potentially could align with private sector of finance screens as well as part of that a part of the value proposition would be that jurisdictions that move in this direction have preferential access to markets and so we heard in Paris for example companies like Unilever making as their big flagship announcements in Paris a commitment to preferential jurisdictional sourcing from jurisdictions that are making progress towards sustainable development and including producing missions from deforestation and forest degradation and so part of the theory of change is that that signal from the global market will get the attention of sub-national political leaders and think well they need to move in this direction and furthermore that producers within the jurisdictions who are affected by these changes in global market preferences will become a political constituency within the district for reform so the idea is that maybe those things could come together and make a real difference but I think in the same way we have to be clear-eyed about the assumptions that underlie the supply chain commitment theory of change there are a lot of shaky assumptions under this jurisdictional approach theory of change as well the first is that there is sufficient incentive embodied in that market access prompt to change the behavior by the producers or the governments and I think the slide that was shown earlier about the different colors of the relationship between soil production and deforestation shows that different municipalities may be very differentially positioned and I think there will be differences across places as well as differences across commodities. The second assumption is that companies are going to be willing to stick their necks out and be advocates for change and at an event at the main venue yesterday I asked the question as an example of a company sticking its neck out and nobody could give me one and the one that we all know about the IPOP experience in Indonesia where the companies took a public commitment to engage on the policy agenda they were disbanded within two years so I guess to I'm running out of time I guess to make a long story short on both the commodity supply chain commitment implementation as well as the jurisdictional approach implementation we face a similar risk of the vibricated supply chains either having the bad guys continue to sell to insensitive markets or having the good guys disengage from bad jurisdictions and leaving it to the bad guys so what do we do about that I think that we're stuck with a complex world where it's a both and solution and we in civil society need to certainly continue to hold the companies accountable for implementing their commitments but at the same time find ways to incentivize them to stay engaged in jurisdictions that may not have made sufficient may not have achieved the nirvana of zero deforestation yet but there's a plausible case that they are on the path to being there and can provide those companies can provide an incentive for further progress my own discussions with private sector people in Indonesia is that they really do need political cover and that in order to not just focus in on cleaning up their own supply chains and buying from small holders that deforested 20 years ago and instead move to the adjacent district where there's still active deforestation going on around the national park they need political cover and political cover can be provided by these sort of multi stakeholder processes that have buy in from civil society and governments but it requires a nuanced approach that I think those of us in civil society haven't always been successful in coordinating. So the bottom line the jurisdictional approach like red plus largely remains a great idea that hasn't been tried yet and the trace tool I think provides a really powerful tool that will help us implement both of those things. Thank you Thank you very much indeed Francis and it really is quite a privilege to have had such a stellar panel and it's great that we have this film because it's quite hard to absorb all the nuggets of experience that our three guests have contributed to this debate as we listen to them. But we've got 20 minutes left and we'd really like to make sure that the vast experience and insights of the room is made the most of and not everyone has a phone or a computer so we're not going to be tyrannical about those people that managed to post a question on this slider tool but just to get a flavour because here's here's some of them and some of them are quite specific about trace which will probably jump over the practical questions around trace because we'll be very happy to discuss those afterwards and there have less general interest to the wider group and quite a few have come up so please get your hands ready but just to kick off shall I say one for yourself this first one which was the top the top rent question it resonates with a lot of the kind of skepticism that we've heard in the room as to what is this gap between who's making the commitment in the company and those that are actually having to implement them and to what extent in your experience in taking this work forwards and assessing progress to date and the lack of data that you've articulated do you think there is a profound lack of practical understanding around implications I'm not sure whether they understand the need of declaration pledge because technically the private sector signing up the need of declaration pledge has to contribute to all goals they are not only signing up to go to and I have my doubts whether that has they do more understand their own pledges so their own their deforestation pledges I think most most companies have thought about them and consequently they are relatively weak there is one of the big problem whose this pledges is they are the very very often they are limited to a particular geography or a particular supply chain they not necessarily have very ambitious time frame so we may say it's great that they have all these pledges but the pledges are not all right so that's very important and one of the big findings and then in the understanding what they can do to actually implement them it's all over the place there are some companies that know it pretty well and others are trying to figure it out as they go along and the easiest for the companies is always just to push the responsibility to the suppliers by saying we by a certain date or even without a certain date we prefer to actually certify Palmo for example without paying a premium you know that doesn't really cost a lot to say that and that's a pledge so well I spend a lot of time thinking I could go on and on and on but that's the direction of so they don't know some but some do really good work so it's also not safe to say that it does seem that part of the solution to that needs to be bringing together different kinds of data sets that different groups are creating to make explicit and transparent what are the shared connections that are given sweeten actors have because this passing the book down the line or back up the supply chain or to a jurisdiction or to a company can happen much more easily when the actors are floating in space and no one really knows the extent to which they're particularly connected to another suite of actors they grab a handle on that then it can drive this cycle of this potentially virtuous cycle of improved transparency and action that Rod was talking about so let's take a couple of questions from the floor I'm sure you've all got comments as well critiques also very welcome let's take two or three starting at the front here please I actually got to re-pause the top question which is my question because I think it's really essential you know this tool looks amazing and I'm really like amazing or well done sorry my name is Ansem even from Terra Genesis International but I would really like to know where this data comes from because I think it's very important to have an idea that this data is independent and it doesn't come just from the companies themselves and so I wonder if you would say a few words about that sure okay let's answer that one because I think a lot of people have that question we don't want to get too distracted on the details but it is pretty fundamental I'm going to ask Sarah to yeah so I'm not the best person to answer this question and who is Javier Goudard who is our senior scientist at SDI who couldn't use a stake to send a bill so he will probably despise my answer but the basic idea that all of this data is collected from currently existing data sets that are government collected so we use customs data, tax data trade data, bills of lading which are the document signs of the ports when the materials are exported and simply combine these so we're stitching these different documents together and they're publicly available but not free so we are purchasing this data and then aggregating it to make it available on the platform we've had conversations with the data providers to give us the ability to do this to make it public as long as it's not reconstructable and they're not using their ability to resell this data in the original form the original form is not what we're showing at all in fact we're showing this very different data product in combination of these different existing government data sets so none of this right now is coming from companies and what we'd like to do ideally is to expand this in either direction to be able to link it with more specific data within the municipalities or better information coming from companies both on downstream end but also the upstream end so if we will extend the supply chain out as well as to add the richness of the environmental and social impact data over it thank you sir I mean call to this that we are interested in working to make the most of data that are already available but have been poorly tapped it's kind of alarming that global trade data has been so poorly used by the sustainability community one question here please and think as well not on the next here think as well not just on questions for your own experiences and reflections on some of these profound risks of bifurcation of companies fleeing from the areas where they really need to invest that you could share with the room just my name is Donovan Burton from Planet Plaining in Australia I suppose the first question is how many companies are secretaries to the NYDF and what percentage you know of impact on forest they represent and then just a comment around Francis his theory I've worked a lot in governments with over 200 cities and it does actually make a huge change Thank you can we just take another one please and if Charlotte and Francis could hold those thoughts in mind and we just get more Good morning I'm Daniel Zimmer from Climate Kick I had a question regarding the entire supply chain and the downstream part for the moment focusing on trade for instance you focus very much on the upstream what about going downstream also involving consumers and then because of all the complexity that we have heard isn't it also a must the entire supply chain will cover better so that people are also buying things better understanding what could be your thoughts about this Thank you, yeah Charlotte please So the New York Declaration has 59 private sector partners out of them 190 there are other big companies how much they have now the same disclaimer as Sarah I need to ask my data people so how much they continue to globally forestation I need to look up I think we have the data what we do know is that generally the companies that have signed up to the New York Declaration and the TFA members are performing better than the ones that have pledges just to see that they are more engaged but that's also a biased group so our interviews were with a biased group because there was already one that is more engaged which is actually responding to this policy on the consumer part it's very important and it has different elements according to the different supply chains there are supply chains where we can already see government action also from the demand side when the import and jurisdiction matters so we see an impact on the revised BIOFU's regulation in the European Union on palm oil a push towards certification we see a clear impact on enforcing illegal timber legislation in the US and in Europe in the US in 2015 there was the first fine issued under the LACI Act it was about 13 million US dollars and that's a significant price thing so that matters, so that is public policy with soy and palm it is very difficult for the consumer to make these choices because it's such a blended product so it's very hard for you to go and go always in the fine print so we need more labeling we need more policy we need more transparency beef and timber is a bit easier because it's for us but the tracing back to it's easier and you can't take a decision but I just tell you don't eat beef there is no way that beef is sustainable there is no way to produce sustainable beef so well there's better and worse there's certainly better and worse but it is problematic thanks thanks we won't get dragged into a discussion of that sorry do you want to add to the question on downstream on this question of downstream it's a great question so the data we have now ends at the country of import but there's obviously room to expand and we can start moving towards including retailers and then that gets us closer to consumers some of this data might be out there we stopped importing countries for the moment but there's certainly wealth of data out there but one of the points that I think you're getting at is that it's simply not just consumers but it's also the governments that are importing as consumers so part of our strategy is working closely with consumer government especially as part of the Amsterdam Declaration where we're seeing these national level commitments to sustainable sourcing of deforestation where you really want to make the most change but the market incentive is still less so really complex thanks thanks Francis and clearly getting the incentives to be aligned do you want to come back on that specific point briefly if you will I just want to follow up on that because I think it's so important I think most of what we've done in GLF and everything on this forest is a supply side issue we've gone on and on about risks to the supply and been trying to push a stone uphill persuading people to move to a business case for which there is no mandate at all so I would love to see us exactly picking up on Francis said use the energy that we've had over the last decade to look at the demand side of this problem and there are things you can do using five things and I've put it on five things in my hand I can remember them all first of all tariffs and trade tariffs between Europe and the supply countries very difficult WTO rules but the big importance of say palm oil, India and China there isn't a WTO problem so you can use tariffs to incentivize sustainable palm oil but unsustainable palm oil so tariffs look at that, secondly, subsidism a lot of cases, we should be looking at that credit from banks also should incentivize people doing the right thing rather than doing the wrong thing and we should also look at tax we should stop taxing goods and stop taxing bads and we should finally use public procurement the power of public procurement those are the five things, remember them on your hand let's have some energy on those issues and not just the supply side issues thank you thank you Andrew, excellent we got a mic too thanks hi, my name is Duncan Gromko I work with Unique Forestry and Land Use thanks very much for the presentations I found them quite interesting so I want to share my reflections I work on a zero deforestation cotton project in Zambia and I'm just imagining trace being used there by the multinational companies that we work with and I fear that exactly what Rob and Francis were talking about if multinationals were to pull out of these municipalities that you would very much see Chinese and other companies like eager to buy from these same suppliers and so it would just be a total leakage effect so I think that transparency is absolutely needed and very important but I wonder what else can we be doing with companies so that to get them to improve the behavior of their supply chain thanks thank you very much that's at the heart of the discussion that we wanted to have here and of course there are many ways in which platform like trace working with other efforts, not all of them data driven that could address that problem we need to talk a lot more about opportunities and data that can expose and help shape those opportunities and not just risks and that is part of our theory of change we need to talk about ways in which companies can actively take themselves out of the picture if they are in a place that has a bad name they can demonstrate through a platform like trace and others that they are not part of the problem that they are part of the solution and we can also demonstrate that if they have a particular level of demand that there aren't that many places that they can go to in many parts of the world if they are serious about meeting these commitments but I mean there is no escaping that risk how do we make sure that these things happen more in unison and that the shared understanding doesn't preempt or come in front of the incentives that are needed to hold the right actions in the right place sir please what other thought on that I think that is an excellent point and it is a huge risk that we face I think there are two points one is the enabling conditions that Andrew just pointed to in terms of making sure there is the right environment that dis-encourages that type of behavior so then if the funding is going through a way and we have the right sort of taxes and so forth in place then it makes it harder to move to a new place but I think another part of that is actually the research that shows this is happening and what the impacts of that are so that someday we are starting to explore the trace in terms of total marine industries around leakage to show in fact that yes the soymilitary area is effective but in fact it is just moving elsewhere and once we can credibly say that leakage is real and that this type of movement is occurring it really just shines the spotlight a little bit more harshly on the disinvestment of companies from a particular place so I think yes there is a role for companies but there is also a role for a number of other actors working in sustainable supply chains to make sure that that doesn't happen Excellent point, thanks Sarah and there is so many in this room I am looking at Crystal and what GFW is doing but there is so many that what can be achieved through the synergies between the likes of GFW Trace and so many other platforms and processes, not all of them about data is enormous and it is beholden upon us in the more research and civil society sectors to ask the right questions at the right time so you can start to produce information that helps prevent these risks Well at time but is there one last burning question, there is one at the front let's take one more there is a mic behind you Thank you A question would be related to some other elements than just the naming and shaming or actually meeting your supply chain commitments because if you look at surveys like Carlton's closure project then you look at the risk that companies face that make them interesting and moving into sort of different stations of supply chain is also the risk of ecosystem services that are crucial for their production will no longer be there so the question would be have you thought into that direction that this data can be used in order to also inform companies on the delivery of ecosystem services to their production side because this could also actually drive the change further Thank you the short answer is yes absolutely and there is some materials we have around Trace that are available outside the room not for any money but better for you to go to the website and some of these questions that people have posed are answered there and the website is www.trace.earth which is quite edgy we realise but it's also memorable Trace.earth Francis is pointing final word Just on that question I think it's ecosystem services yes but in a lot of these places the returns and the economies are so short term that nobody cares I think the other interesting angle is long term supply and that's more of a motivation for the companies if these basically resources are going to run out so that's the main question Thanks well and on that note I would like to warmly thank our panel and all of you for having come and please do stay connected and the whole idea of this one intense day is to make the most of these conversations so hopefully this can inspire more conversations and more activity in this space thank you all for coming