Climate change: How the UK contributes to global deforestation (excerpt): BBC

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"Cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy, timber, beef and leather.

It's estimated that an area the size of the UK was used abroad every year between 2016 and 2018, to meet British demand for these natural materials.

People everywhere rely on things like these for everyday products and our need for them in the UK could be making climate change worse.

Palm Oil Plantation

It's all to do with the trees cut down around the world to help make those products. 

Globally it's thought deforestation is responsible for about 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
And according to the World Economic Forum, half of the world's tropical deforestation is illegal.

Now the UK wants big businesses to have to prove their brands aren't linked to illegal logging. Although some say the plan doesn't go far enough and it's not clear what the punishments would be if businesses don't do that.

Conservationists think many of the countries those things are

Palm Oil Nuts

coming from, and the products themselves, are strongly linked to illegal deforestation.

Chopping down trees to sell the timber, or to clear the land to produce something else there instead - without the right permission - is a multimillion-pound illegal industry."


See complete BBC article

It appears all developed countries using these products, dependent 
on deforestration, are responsible.

Related: Your Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered: NYT

Also: The End of the Environment: Bob Brown.: The Saturday Paper (excerpt)



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