With Europe’s move to delay tropical forest protections, everything burns (commentary)

With Europe’s move to delay tropical forest protections, everything burns (commentary)


Forests. We can’t live without them. If they burn, we die. Many forests are at risk today. The Amazon has been so damaged that it may shift from being a carbon sink to a carbon source and morph into a savanna. Scientists overwhelmingly tell us that if humanity wants a future on a habitable planet, we must protect our last forests that remain. Experts agree that to avert climate chaos, we must immediately halt and reverse global deforestation. For a while it seemed that the EU was stepping up to save global forests, with a bold, beautiful law called the “EU Deforestation Regulation” or EUDR. Last week, the EU Commission flip-flopped and announced it wants to delay the law for a year, instead of allowing the law to enter into force in January 2025. And it gets worse: delaying automatically means opening up the law to get watered down. Farms or forests? Commodity crops such as soy are major drivers of tropical deforestation. Image courtesy of Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace. This decision isn’t just destructive for forests, it’s also bad for business: it flies in the face of hard efforts by thousands of companies who did everything to get into compliance on time. Indeed, roughly 15,000 companies had spoken out for the EUDR and its sister law, the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Investors representing north of $6 trillion in assets under management supported such regulation. It’s also bad for democracy: civil society clamored for the EUDR, with millions of people signing petitions, attending protests, writing letters, and making calls, or speaking out in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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South Africa Today – Environment

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