Forest Trends in the News

More companies are making commitments to limit their supply chains’ adverse effects on the world’s forests, but a new report by a watchdog group found many still fail to act on their pledges and that one in three companies has at least one “dormant” commitment.

This story first appeared on Ecosystem Marketplace In January of this year, consumer-goods giant Unilever agreed to help three small and remote Indonesian villages change the way 600 farmers harvest palm oil.

In January of this year, consumer-goods giant Unilever agreed to help three small and remote Indonesian villages change the way 600 farmers harvest palm oil.

Police in Mondolkiri province have suspended the chiefs of two border checkpoints suspected of colluding with Vietnamese loggers to let them sneak into the country and smuggle out timber, a local official said on Monday.

The number of manufacturers using one of the four key commodities linked to deforestation has increased from 67% to 71%, but a worrying number of targets have been missed or forgotten, according to a new report.

A wave of efforts to increase transparency and ethics in complex global supply chains in recent years has not only unearthed grave ongoing issues, but a groundswell of private sector commitments to address them. Two that have risen to the forefront of concern for multinationals are deforestation and human rights abuses.

The impact of the global palm oil industry on human rights and deforestation has inspired many NGOs to push multinational companies to become far more transparent about their operations and supply chains.

As environmentalism becomes more mainstream and consumers grow more aware about the means of production, private sector entities have increasingly committed to zero deforestation policies. A new report released Wednesday analyzes hundreds of deforestation commitments by companies linked to palm, soy, timber and pulp, and cattle, and finds that more and more firms are being […]

In the last three years, hundreds of companies have pledged to reduce their impact on forests by changing the way they produce or procure the four commodities driving most deforestation – namely, palm, soy, cattle, and timber & pulp – but until recently, they were only disclosing progress on one-third of their commitments.

The world of investments, capital, stocks and shares can seem very far away from the natural world. The rapid movement of money from institution to institution, zipping across the world through transfers and clicks is the antithesis of slow-growing forests or reefs deep below the waves.