| Abstract: |
Zero deforestation, deforestation free, carbon neutral, climate smart - there is no shortage of terms used as market branding to appeal to consumers who want to take personal responsibility for their share of global deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Do such words have any meaning? How can such things be measured? Is there indeed increased accountability with all these claims? Will smallholder producers be excluded from value chains as their produce is undocumented? Will the global climate problem become more manageable if more consumers buy from such value chains?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to understand the bigger picture: the emissions that cause global climate change; the way countries have so far agreed to account for emissions; and the degree to which agreements are matched by accountability. Current UNFCCC accounting systems are essentially supply-side, while emissions are counted on the production side, based on country land area and production systems. An alternative would be demand-side accounting, starting from the human population and its per capita emissions that determine demand and with the
footprints or emissions attributable to a product or service based on a life-cycle analysis. Supply-side accounting is reflected in labels for deforestation-free products as producers attempt to satisfy end consumers’ demand. However,
isolating one production chain from other land uses at the landscape level is not an accurate reflection of reality due to the linkages of drivers and actors. For example, areas converted to coffee in central Vietnam are defined as “degraded forest” or “scrub,” but such land classes continue to be produced by other actors and land uses in the same landscape. Rausch and Gibbs (2016) also pointed at such loopholes in current zero deforestation claims with Brazilian soybean. |
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