Products tied to legal and illegal deforestation may be banned in the European Union

November 21, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Maxwell Radwin, Mongabay (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Proposed legislation in the European Union would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to legal or illegal deforestation.
The law would focus on the industries with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture.
Conservation groups have expressed satisfaction with the first-of-its kind legislation but are concerned about the lack of protections for Indigenous peoples, as well as carbon-rich ecosystems like savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

The European Union is considering an ambitious new proposal that would regulate imports of products linked to global forest loss.

The law would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to deforestation, whether legal or illegal. If passed, it would force producers to raise their environmental standards or risk losing out on a market of 27 countries and 450 million people.

“Europe is finally taking steps against the deforestation that it drives, and it is doing it not by placing the burden on consumers, but on the big companies that produce these products,” Nico Muzi, Europe director of environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth, told Mongabay. “If we want change, we need to regulate the industries that cause deforestation.”

The proposal, introduced by the European Commission earlier this week, gives special focus to products with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture. Should the proposal pass, importers will have to meet stricter traceability measures, such as sharing geographic coordinates of where their products originated.

It also establishes a benchmarking system to determine which countries are the most at risk of deforestation, and pledges 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to help them develop more sustainable forest management programs.

The EU predicts the proposal will cut at least 31.9 million metric tons of annual carbon emissions and save around 3.2 billion euros ($3.6 billion).

“We must protect biodiversity and fight climate change not only in the EU, but globally, and our consumption should not contribute to global deforestation, which is a major cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries.

Between 1990 and 2020, an estimated 420 million trees were lost to deforestation worldwide, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Agriculture is responsible for nearly 90% of that, with cattle ranching being the biggest contributor.

Globally, Europe is the second-largest importer of products associated with deforestation, according to a 2021 WWF report. In recent years, trade to the region has led to around 16% of global forest loss.

*A herd of cattle on a ranch in Colombia. Image by Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com*

The deforestation proposal is part of a package of recently announced environmental initiatives that include more rigorous regulations for waste and waste trafficking, as well as improved soil protections to increase carbon storage in agricultural areas, fight desertification and restore degraded land, the European Commission said in a statement.

“If we expect more ambitious climate and environmental policies from partners, we should stop exporting pollution and supporting deforestation ourselves,” Sinkevičius said, adding, “With these proposals, we are taking our responsibility and walking the talk by lowering our global impact on pollution and biodiversity loss.”

Other countries, coming out of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, have announced similar plans to clean up supply chains. Last week, the U.K. passed a law banning products linked to illegal deforestation. In October, U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill that holds importers accountable for forest loss.

However, unlike the European proposal, neither of those measures targets legal drivers of deforestation.

Loopholes and missed opportunities

While the EU’s proposal takes ambitious steps to protect forests, it falls short when it comes to other types of carbon-rich ecosystems, some environmental groups pointed out. For example, the proposal’s current language would exclude protection of many savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

In addition to storing massive amounts of carbon, these ecosystems prevent soil erosion and flooding, and help provide clean drinking water.

“There’s simply no need to destroy native ecosystems to make room for commercial crops,” Mighty Earth’s Muzi said. “There are more than 1 billion acres [400 million hectares] of previously degraded land where all future agricultural needs can easily be met without threatening the world’s last ecosystems.”

Mongabay has reported extensively on the rapid disappearance of wetlands and peatlands due to palm oil, timber and other agricultural commodities, as well as governments’ continued omission of these landscapes from legislation.

The EU’s proposal also fails to include special protections for Indigenous communities, which often serve as stewards of the environment. Instead, it relies on the local laws of the exporting countries despite the fact they’re often weak or ignored.

Muzi said he expects officials to close this loophole by including international human rights standards in the proposal’s language. And because proposals by the European Commission are often heavily revised, he expects many of the other loopholes to be addressed, too.

“Usually, Europe sets the standard for environmental regulations,” he said. “It is often at the forefront. We expect other regions will follow.”

How Curators Transferred Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks’ Archives to Escape Wildfires

December 26, 2020 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*The sequoias that live on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California are the largest trees in the world by volume. Erin Donalson/EyeEm via Getty Images*

By Emily Lin, Head of Digital Curation and Scholarship, University of California, Merced.

Editor’s note: As wildfires came dangerously close to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in September 2020, the curator of the archives there worked with Emily Lin, librarian and head of digital curation at the University of California Merced, to evacuate the archives to keep them safe. In this interview, Lin explains how they evacuated the records, what’s in them and why they’re worth preserving.

Listen to Emily Lin of UC Merced talk about the archives and see the contents of the park archives and photos from the evacuation.

Why were the archives of Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks evacuated?

Ward Eldredge, the curator of the archives of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and I had been talking about the potential partnership around digitization of collections that had been housed there for a couple of years now. There’s been a concern about the safety of these records because wildfires in the past few years have been an annual threat. So the long-term safekeeping of the records was very much on Eldredge’s mind. And he pointed out that the UC Merced campus is located in one of the few areas in California that are outside of a high-risk fire zone and also outside of the risk of earthquakes. There was just no question that we would do whatever we could to bring them here for safekeeping.

*The Castle Fire in October 2020 burned hundreds of Sequoias in the privately owned Alder Creek grove that NGO Save the Redwoods League purchased less than a year ago. Al Seib/LA Times via Getty Images*

In September, when the fires got really close to the park, Eldredge was trying really hard to find a way to move the materials. He just couldn’t find a van or a truck because the residents in the area were also being called to evacuate, and there was a shortage. So in the course of a day, we managed to make arrangements to take our moving truck from campus, and he was able to secure a U-Haul truck. We were able to pack everything and move it out of the mountains to the UC Merced campus, which is two and a half hours away.

What’s in these archives?

There were hundreds of boxes of collections, about 600 linear feet, and also cabinets of plant specimens and artifacts.

It’s a complete record of the administrative history of the park. Sequoia was the second-oldest national park in the U.S., established in 1890. So there are records related to its founding and through to the 20th century. In letters written by the park directors to the U.S. president and the secretaries of the Department of the Interior, one can see how the thinking around managing public lands, conservation, fire and forest management changed over the last century.

Before the park was established, people would cut the sequoias down for timber. The city of Los Angeles wanted to build a dam in Kings Canyon up until 1965. So you can see how the thinking changed and how we got from that way of thinking to really establishing the National Park Service and protecting these unique environments.

There’s an incredible photographic record – tens of thousands of photographs that cover pretty much every place within the park. There are maps of the sequoia groves, maps related to how trails and roads and other buildings were constructed. We take these trails for granted, but they were huge undertakings involving hundreds of workers breaking rocks, cutting trees and excavating for years. They worked through the winter sometimes to do it within schedule. These projects also provided jobs during the Great Depression.

Who will find them useful?

Anyone, from those within the parks who want to better understand the history of the park, to the rangers and the interpreters who want to provide and present that history to the general public. Ken Burns, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker, accessed these records while he was making his television series about the national parks.

They’ll also be more widely available for students to use. There’s plenty of material in there for lots of Ph.D. students working on dissertations and for those who want to really investigate how best to manage public lands and determine what’s effective. That knowledge is going to benefit the broader public and help conserve these national parks for all of us. There’s a rich record that can help us understand what is unique about the environment that allows these trees to survive.

What are the plans for keeping the archives at UC Merced?

When the records were kept in the park, it was just one person, Ward Eldredge, maintaining the records. That’s a lot of work. You could make an appointment and he could provide access if you wanted to come to the park, but it’s in a very small space within the park headquarters, so the accessibility was definitely limited. Now that these collections are at the library at UC Merced, it will be easier for people to be able to access them.

Our vision is to be able to digitize much of this material. Once it’s online, it will be a lot easier for people to at least see and maybe answer some of their immediate questions. And if there’s a need for them to see the physical material, they can still make arrangements to do that.

There’s still a long way to go, because normally, we would have to make a plan with the National Park Service, raise funds, build the facilities to store them safely and so on. Because we had to evacuate them, we still have to work on formalizing an agreement, but our goal is eventually to make sure that these records will be safe.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Amid Drought, Phoenix Plans for a Future With Less Water

June 7, 2019 / activist360 / Leave a comment

As the Colorado River’s flow declines mostly due to overuse and climate change, water supplies in seven states are imperiled by potential shortages. That includes Arizona, which recently passed legislation outlining steps it would take if water from the river continues to decrease. But what does a looming water shortage mean for Phoenix, the state’s most populous city? Hari Sreenivasan reports.