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Peru’s deadly floods are a wake-up call for cities across Latin America to prepare better for extreme weather as climate change and poor urban planning, alongside rapid population growth, worsen the problem of flooding, experts say.

BOGOTA, March 23 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Peru’s deadly floods are a wake-up call for cities across Latin America to prepare better for extreme weather as climate change and poor urban planning, alongside rapid population growth, worsen the problem of flooding, experts say.

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.

Recent years have witnessed a groundswell of private sector commitments to reducing deforestation linked to the agricultural commodities that underpin vast corporate supply chains. A growing number of companies have been sharing their progress toward those pledges, according to the latest annual report from Forest Trends’ Supply Change initiative.

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.