Evizda

Major corporations involved with commodities like beef, palm oil, and soya pledged in 2010 to end deforestation over the next decade—but instead of fulfilling that promise, a new Greenpeace International analysis found the companies are set to destroy at least 50 million hectares of forest worldwide by 2020.

“Our message to companies is simple: evolve your business to prevent climate and ecological breakdown.”
—Anna Jones, Greenpeace U.K.That estimate—the environmental advocacy group noted in a statement announcing its Countdown to Extinction report (pdf) Tuesday—is comparable to the size of Spain.

It is also “a conservative estimate,” the group said, based on a combination of data on deforestation, tree cover loss, and forecasting through 2019. Given recent increases in tree loss cover, “the actual figure could be much higher.”

Companies named in the report include General Mills, IKEA, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg, L’Oréal, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever.

Greenpeace released its new report as over a thousand corporate executives were in Vancouver for the global summit of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), a organization led by various CEOs that brings together retailers and manufacturers.

In 2010, the CGF’s board approved a resolution to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020 “through the responsible sourcing of these key commodities—soy, palm oil, paper and pulp, and cattle—so that the sourcing of these key commodities will not deplete tropical rainforests.”

The Greenpeace report, released just months away from the CGF’s deadline, details how consumer goods companies have failed to meet the deforestation goal, and the consequences of it. As Greenpeace U.K.’s Anna Jones put it, “these companies are destroying our children’s future by driving us towards climate and ecological collapse.”

“They’ve wasted a decade on half-measures and in that time vast areas of the natural world have been destroyed,” said Jones, the group’s global project lead for forests. “They should be in crisis talks right now, but they’re still trying to grow demand for products that will drive forest destruction even further.”

The CGF told The Guardian in a statement Tuesday that “members have moved substantially closer to our goal of 100 percent sustainable sourcing of the four commodity groups. But over the last nine years we have also learned that the forces driving deforestation are more complex than almost any stakeholder realized in 2010.”