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Summary Commodity trade is central to the global economy but is also associated with socio-environmental impacts, for example, deforestation, especially in producer countries. It is crucial to understand how geographic sourcing patterns of commodities and commercial relationships between places and actors influence land-use dynamics, socio-economic development, and environmental degradation. Here, we propose a concept and methodological approach to analyze the geographic stickiness of commodity supply chains, which is the maintenance of supply network configurations over time and across perturbations. We showcase policy-relevant metrics for all Brazilian soy exports between 2003 and 2017, using high-resolution supply chain data from www.trase.earth . We find that the Brazilian soy traders with the largest market share exhibit stickier geographic sourcing patterns, and that the supply network configurations between production places and traders become increasingly sticky in subsequent years. Understanding trade stickiness is crucial for supply chain accountability, because it directly affects the effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments.

Across carbon- and biodiversity-rich tropical forests, titling initiatives are implemented with the goal of regularizing land tenure and decreasing deforestation. However, the effect of tenure security on deforestation is theoretically ambiguous, and credible empirical evidence is lacking. We analyse the responses of 10,647 landholders between 2011 and 2016 to a large-scale land-titling programme called Terra Legal in the Brazilian Amazon, set to regulate an area as big as Germany and France combined. Using a fixed-effects regression modelling strategy and property-level data, we managed to explore the causal chain between land titling and deforestation. Contrary to expectations, we find evidence that small and medium landholders increased deforestation in response to the programme, whereas large landholders remained largely unaffected. Landholders with property titles deforest more as crop and cattle prices increase, indicating greater market integration at the expense of conservation. Our results suggest that titling alone without greater coordination with other policies will not yield the expected environmental benefits. A large-scale land-titling programme in the Brazilian Amazon did not affect forest cover in large landholdings, but induced deforestation in the small and medium ones, driven by crop and cattle price increases.

Consumer countries and blocs, including the UK and the EU, are defining legal measures to tackle deforestation linked to commodity imports, potentially requiring imported goods to comply with the relevant producer countries’ land-use laws. Nonetheless, this measure is insufficient to address global deforestation. Using Brazil’s example of a key exporter of forest-risk commodities, here we show that it has ~3.25 Mha of natural habitat (~152.8 million tons of CO2) at a high risk of legal deforestation until 2025. Additionally, the country’s legal framework is going through modifications to legalize agricultural production in illegally deforested areas. What was illegal may become legal shortly. Hence, a legality criterion adopted by consumer countries is insufficient to protect forests and other ecosystems and may worsen deforestation and conversion risks by incentivizing the weakening of social-environmental protection by producer countries.

Reducing large-scale deforestation in commodity frontiers remains a key challenge for climate change mitigation and the conservation of biodiversity. Public and private anti-deforestation policies have been shown to effectively reduce forest loss, but the conditions under which such policies get adopted are rarely examined. Here we propose a set of conditions that we expect to be associated with the adoption of effective anti-deforestation policies in commodity frontiers. We then examine whether these conditions have influenced policy adoption in South America’s major soy-and-cattle frontiers: the Brazilian Amazon, the Cerrado, the Chaco, the Chiquitano, and Paraguay’s Atlantic Forest. By collating empirical data from diverse sources, including literature review, extensive expert interviews, and analysis of primary and secondary data, we show that the Cerrado, the Chaco, and the Chiquitano differ from the Brazilian Amazon in multiple ways that might have inhibited adoptions of effective anti-deforestation instruments. These conditions include: a higher importance of the agricultural sector within the respective countries, lower carbon stocks and species richness, higher prevalence of private land tenure, and higher baseline compliance with forest reserve regulations on private lands. We also observe that the adoption of the most effective private anti-deforestation instrument, commodity moratoria, may respond to similar conditions as those influencing the adoption of public instruments. Incentivizing public and private actors to adopt effective anti-deforestation policies in the Cerrado, Chaco, and the Chiquitano will likely be more challenging than it has been in the Brazilian Amazon.

Consumer countries play an important role in driving tropical deforestation through imports of forest risk commodities (FRCs), but their role in reducing deforestation has received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on suggestions from grey literature and a European Commission (EC) public consultation, we identify 1,141 policy proposals for the EU and other consumer countries to address tropical deforestation, which we summarize into 86 unique policy options. Two-third of these are informational and supportive policies, while regulatory and especially market-based options are less-often proposed. We assess the political feasibility and map the ‘theory of change’ (TOC) through which the policies address tropical deforestation. Several feasible options exist, though most of these rely on less coercive — informational and cooperative — policy instruments. Most policy proposals lack an explicit and proven TOC, reducing their potential impact on reducing deforestation. Due diligence and multi-stakeholder fora stand out as policies that are feasible, yet rest on convincing TOCs. To increase the feasibility and impact of consumer-country deforestation policy options, we propose three principles: i) Build policies on a clear theory of change, ii) apply policy packaging and sequencing, and iii) work with stakeholders in key supply-chains and regions, broadening scope over time.

Trade agreements could help to protect human rights, critical ecosystems, and the climate—but only if sustainability becomes a cornerstone of international trade. The EU-Mercosur trade agreement fails to meet our three tenets of sustainable trade agreements: (1) inclusion of local communities, (2) transparency mechanisms to trace commodities and provide open-access information, and (3) enforcement to legally uphold sustainability commitments.

This paper offers an analytical model for policy analysis. It aims at providing a comprehensive framework of instruments to assess whether and how a policy is leading towards sustainability in a broad, deep and transformational sense. It uses the theoretical principles of green political economy to develop analytical axes, namely social-ecological resilience, capabilities for human flourishing and strong sustainability. Furthermore, critical processes are articulated in order to search for additional sources of evidence for structural change. These are identified as addressing inequality, decoupling development from growth and relocalising the economy. This policy analysis framework is designed for policies that integrate environmental, social and economic dimensions, for example Integrated Conservation and Development Projects, REDD+ programs as well as other all-encompassing policies.