Supporting legal compliance and zero deforestation in Brazil

An increasing number of companies producing and trading agricultural and forest commodities – including soy, sugar, cattle and forest products – are committed to eliminating deforestation from their supply chains. 

Companies urgently need a set of tools to help them to meet the Forest Code and implement their zero deforestation commitments.

In Brazil various initiatives are dedicated to assessing environmental and other risks associated with commodity production, while a number of other initiatives seek to mitigate those risks. These voluntary initiatives are dispersed and often unknown to the private sector.

The report identifies initiatives that could help mitigate the risk of deforestation  

This report brings together 73 tools and initiatives that already exist in Brazil and which can help companies to implement the Brazilian Forest Code and achieve their zero deforestation commitments.

The study and accompanying spreadsheet provides a survey of the tools and initiatives, including:

• Mapping and monitoring initiatives that help companies to identify and analyse the risk of deforestation in particular regions, and
• Public and private initiatives that could help them mitigate of the risk of deforestation in each region.

The survey highlights the reliable and sophisticated systems that already exist for mapping and monitoring deforestation in Brazil, as well as emerging systems that are being developed. It reveals the large number of initiatives that exist at local or regional level to mitigate deforestation, especially in the Amazon biome.

This report is an intermediate product. In a further stage, the project will develop an open, online platform to present the initiatives through a geographical information tool, and support their use across Brazil to help eliminate deforestation from Brazilian agriculture and forestry commodity chains.