‘Route to climate hell’, NGOs criticize about agro plan launched at COP27

The homework presented by the largest global agribusiness multinationals, at the beginning of COP27 (UN climate conference), to align the sector with the goal of containing global warming, was harshly criticized by environmental organizations this Tuesday (8).

The document, defined as a roadmap for the alignment to 1.5ºC (acceptable global warming ceiling), was presented on Monday (7) as a promised result at COP26, last year, when the biggest representatives of the sector have committed themselves to drawing up strategic guidelines in this direction.

The document was signed by giants in the meat, soy and palm oil sectors. Among them, ADM, Amaggi, JBS, Cargill, Bunge, Marfrig and the Chinese COFCO. The initiative is organized by the Tropical Forest Alliance and centered on the World Economic Forum.

The plan, however, was considered broad, vague and distant from what would be the fundamental commitment for the sector to stop being a vector of climate change: the immediate fight against deforestation, in the view of NGOs and research institutes in the climate area.

“The absence of a clear cut-off date and targets to eliminate the conversion of the soy production chain locks the sector on a trajectory of high carbon emissions”, says Mauricio Voivodic, executive director of WWF-Brazil.

“Science demonstrates that deforestation and conversion must be urgently eliminated from commodity supply chains to sufficiently decrease global greenhouse gas emissions and reach the 1.5°C target,” he adds.

Tropical Forest Alliance and signatory companies did not return to email contacts made by the report to comment on the criticism.

For the WWF’s policy and advocacy manager, Jean-François Timmers, “this map leads us to an increase of up to 3ºC”. “The ‘road map’ is a route to climate hell,” he says.

In a statement, Rainforest Foundation Norway said the plan is a “road map” to continue deforestation, sending a message to suppliers to continue and accelerate vegetation suppression. “Map of the way to climate catastrophe”, punctuated the note, echoing the ironic tone with which the announcement was received at COP27.

The criticisms were gathered in a manifesto signed by 100 environmental organizations, published this Tuesday (8). The text points to the urgent need for strong, binding and comprehensive regulations on deforestation-free products, while calling the companies’ voluntary plans “incremental changes”.

The manifesto also sets out eight criteria that should guide global agribusiness commitments. In addition to fighting deforestation, the proposal highlights the need to track direct and indirect suppliers, the scope of the commitment also to non-forest biomes (for example, the cerrado and caatinga), and the refusal of products coming from deforested areas from of 2020.

Criteria that help guide the effectiveness of commitment announcements, separating what is significant action from so-called greenwashing (an expression in English that means “green makeup”) were also launched this Tuesday at COP27 by a group of high-level experts appointed by the UN .

The group has worked over the past year on recommendations on how to prevent greenwashing. The mission was given by the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, in the face of a flood of promises from companies and governments to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.

For commitments to be taken seriously, the group said, they need to have a clear attribution of responsibility to an organization and they must be quick enough to limit global warming to as little as 1.5C.

Emissions offsetting mechanisms (such as planting trees to offset the emission of an airplane flight) should be left for the later years of the commitment, so that they do not serve as a delay in implementation.

The group, made up of bankers, researchers and former ministers, also recommends that the announced commitments be independently verified.

One of the members of the group is the former Minister of Finance Joaquim Levy. “The report provides clear guidance on why and how actors must urgently publish concrete, transparent and science-based transition plans,” he said.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}