Trase highlights need to combine perspectives and metrics to limit deforestation

Trase researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute, Chalmers University, University of California Santa Barbara, and Université Catholique de Louvain, outline a way forward to ensure that measures aiming at limiting deforestation globally are successful.

The new perspective published by the scientific journal Conservation Letters, suggests measures to ensure more effective monitoring of deforestation globally.

Commodity-driven deforestation affects climate, biodiversity and livelihoods

More than 90% of tropical deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture, with beef, palm oil, and soy being linked to most of the conversion of forests to agricultural land. Commodity-driven deforestation and forest degradation have led to profound global impacts on the climate, biodiversity and livelihoods.

These commodities are either consumed domestically or exported, mostly to places in which deforestation for agricultural expansion has decreased or halted, allowing importing countries to outsource their environmental impact.

In response to this global challenge, public and private policy initiatives are emerging to tackle deforestation in producing countries, such as the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land use (COP26 in 2021), strategies to move towards deforestation-free supply chains in France (2018) and Germany (2010), or proposed supply chain regulations in the EU Parliament and Council (2023), United Kingdom (2022) and United States (2021).

But, to date, zero-deforestation commitments have had a limited impact on global deforestation. So, what is the way forward?

Challenges with monitoring the effectiveness of deforestation policies

The availability of data linking agricultural commodity production and supply chains to deforestation across the tropics has been improving over the years. One of the main challenges with monitoring the effectiveness of policies to reduce deforestation is that policy measures are typically concerned only with deforestation occurring within the bounds of either territories or as linked to supply chains (see illustration).

As a result, each regulation, enforcement and monitoring effort are necessarily limited to a portion of the deforestation on the ground.

The authors argue that existing metrics linking deforestation and forest degradation to commodity production typically consider two distinct questions:

• How much of today’s commodity production is associated with past deforestation?
• To what extent is today’s deforestation driven by the prospects of producing a specific commodity in the future?

The authors describe how metrics typically respond to only one of these questions and suggest that classifying metrics according to their commodity or deforestation focus (see illustration) can help highlight blind spots in monitoring. To facilitate the communication and use of these perspectives and metrics, the article also outlines a terminology that could help build a common ground for monitoring efforts.

The authors conclude with two recommendations:

First, deforestation reduction measures should be informed by a combination of metrics that have both a territorial and supply chain scope, and are informed by assessments of past deforestation linked to commodity production, together with assessments of deforestation as it happens.

Second, civil society organisations and multi-stakeholder groups should continue to strive for more transparent commodity supply chain information to allow for more metrics and perspectives to be combined in independent monitoring efforts.

Lathuillière, M. J., Gardner, T. A., Persson, M. U., Ribeiro, V., Heilmayr, R., Pendrill, F., & Meyfroidt. P. (2025). Complementary perspectives and metrics are essential to end deforestation. Conservation Letters, 18:e13145. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13145

This article was first published by the Stockholm Environment Institute as Trase: “It is essential to combine perspectives to limit deforestation”.