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Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government policies to limit global deforestation.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair for this debate, Mr Vickers. I know how important these matters are to your constituents in Brigg and Immingham, as they are to mine in Brent West.
It may seem strange to start a debate on policies to combat deforestation by speaking about rivers, but I want to pose a challenge to colleagues this morning, to see whether any of them can name the largest river on the planet. I will happily give way to anyone who thinks they can.
Barry Gardiner
No, it is not the Plate. It is not the River Nile, and it is not the Amazon, but if anyone thought it was the Amazon, they are getting close. The river I am speaking of is actually, for the most part, invisible and airborne. Every day, 20 billion cubic metres of water—that is 20 billion metric tonnes of water—is pushed up into the atmosphere by the forests of the Amazon basin. That water does not stay in the atmosphere; it is not like evaporation from the oceans. It is generated by a unique combination of the organic forest interacting with the inorganic atmosphere. It is seeded with microscopic spores of pollen and fungi. These make the Amazonian clouds heavy, which means that all that water rains back down across the continent, replenishing the forest and irrigating a land mass that otherwise would probably be a desert. The Amazon river as we know it—all 4,000 miles of it—pours just 17 billion tonnes of water into the Atlantic ocean every day, so the invisible river of transpiration beats it by 3 billion tonnes a day. Imagine the power it takes to push 20 billion tonnes up into the atmosphere.
On Brazil’s border with Paraguay is the Itaipu dam, the second most powerful hydroelectric power station in the world after the Three Gorges dam in China. Itaipu’s capacity is 14 MW. That is about four and a half times the capacity of Hinkley Point C, if Hinkley ever manages to get built. We would need 5,000 Itaipu power stations to push the 20 billion tonnes of water up into the atmosphere that that forest does every single day.
Forests are amazing. The Amazon is not alone, of course. The second lung of our planet is the Congo basin in Africa, and while we are talking about famous dams, it is worth noting that the Aswan dam, some 2,000 miles away, relies for 85% of its power on water that the Congo forest transpiration has deposited into the Ethiopian highlands, coming down through the Nile to Aswan.
Forests are amazing, or, to be a little more scientific about it, forest ecosystems provide critical and diverse services to human society. They are a primary habitat for a wide range of species. They support biodiversity and conservation. Forest growth sequesters and stores carbon from the atmosphere. It contributes to regulation of the global carbon cycle and mitigates climate change. Healthy forests produce soil and conserve it. They stabilise stream flows and water run-off, preventing land degradation and desertification. Forests reduce the risks of natural disasters such as droughts, floods and landslides. They contribute to poverty eradication and to economic development by providing food, fibre, timber and other forest products for subsistence and income generation. They are a key genetic source for the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to global human health, and they even serve as sites of aesthetic, recreational and spiritual values in so many cultures.
Forests may be home to 80% of land species, but they are also vital to the survival of our own. They produce 40% of the oxygen we breathe, support 1.6 billion livelihoods and play a crucial role in holding back a climate disaster on a massive scale.
What about deforestation? That has been happening for a long time. In fact, since the end of the last ice age, the world has lost one third of all its forests—that is about 2 billion hectares, or two United States of Americas. But even though it has been happening for about 11,000 years, the rate of acceleration is rather recent and incredibly alarming. More than half of all the forest lost since the Pleistocene has gone in the last 125 years—1.1 billion hectares gone.
The drivers of deforestation are well known. Agricultural expansion remains the single largest cause, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, is responsible for 88% of global deforestation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that it contributes 11% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Similarly, in its report on deforestation in January last year, the Environmental Audit Committee identified what we might call the seven deadly sins of deforestation—the seven commodities that are driving 90% of global deforestation: beef and leather, soy, timber, palm oil, paper, rubber and cocoa.
However, the EAC was only picking up on the Global Resource Initiative taskforce’s recommendations from 2020. I commend the previous Conservative Government for establishing the GRI taskforce under the chairmanship of Sir Ian Cheshire as part of the 25-year environment plan. Sir Ian realised that if the market was to transition to sustainable commodity supply chains, it would need Government to adopt a strategic, co-ordinated approach to align and accelerate action.
The Government’s response to the taskforce’s 14 recommendations showed real understanding of the issues. They said:
“When nature’s free services fail, the poorest people suffer first and worst. Over a billion people rely directly on forests for their livelihoods—including indigenous peoples who look after around 80% of biodiversity.”
They continued:
“Protecting and restoring mangroves, forests, and peatlands could provide around a third of the most cost-effective climate change solutions we need, while supporting species and helping communities adapt to become more resilient. Shifting towards more sustainable forms of agriculture would not only protect the planet’s lungs, but it could add a further $2.3trn in productive growth to the global economy and create a further 200 million jobs by 2050…We know that there is no pathway to Net Zero emissions—or indeed the Sustainable Development Goals—that does not involve protecting and restoring nature on an unprecedented scale. But despite the huge contribution nature can make, it attracts just 3% of global climate finance.”
I suspect that the excellence of that written response is directly attributable to the noble Lord Goldsmith. But an excellence of understanding requires an excellence of follow-through, and that was less excellent.
It is true that in response to the taskforce’s recommendation to mobilise
“a global call for action to tackle deforestation and build sustainable commodity supply chains in the lead up to COP26”,
the Johnson Government did deliver a call to action—but a call to action and action are two different things. Yes, more than 100 global leaders signed up to the pledge to halt deforestation by 2030, and, yes, 30 financial institutions, managing nearly $9 trillion in assets between them, promised to disclose the
“deforestation risk and mitigation activities in their portfolios”
by 2023, and to eliminate harmful practices from their portfolios by 2025. But ’23 has come and gone. Today it is 2025, and we are still not eating the
“guilt free chocolate…that’s carbon not calorie guilt free”,
that Boris Johnson boasted about. We are nowhere near on track to halting forest loss by 2030.
One of the things that fuels people’s disillusionment with politics is that so much fanfare surrounds policy announcements, but so little of the hard graft of delivery gets done after the announcements have been made. The public understand that our diets and supply chains are deeply entwined with this issue. We may not see the bulldozers or the farmers who are eking out a living with slash and burn, but the products we consume every day, from chocolate bars to cooking oils, link us directly to the deforestation that we say we want to stop. If we told the public that we had just destroyed the entire New Forest, they would be horrified, yet that is the area of forest that our failure to enact the due diligence recommendations has eradicated since 2021. With that knowledge comes the understanding that we are complicit.
But there is only so much that people can do through their individual action and choices. That is why the taskforce’s recommendations about a due diligence obligation were so important. It said that the Government should “urgently” introduce
“a mandatory due diligence obligation for companies that place commodities and derived products that contribute to deforestation on the UK market”,
and that they should take action to ensure that similar principles are applied to the finance industry. That due diligence obligation would require companies to analyse the presence of environmental and human rights risks and impacts within their supply chains, take action to prevent or mitigate them, and publicly report on actions taken and planned. The financial sector would also be covered by a similar mandatory due diligence obligation, requiring it to exercise due diligence to ensure that its lending and investments do not fund deforestation.
The taskforce demanded action, and in the Environment Act 2021 it got a pale version of it. The Act introduced measures to prohibit UK businesses from using commodities grown on illegally deforested or occupied land. At the COP28 summit in Dubai in 2023, the UK delegation announced the list of commodities that could be included in environmental law and explained that businesses with more than £50 million in global annual turnover that use more than 500 metric tonnes of commodities a year would need to source from land they could prove was not illegally deforested.
Although well intentioned, by focusing on legality, the Act failed to hold out an absolute standard of whether the supply chain was in fact involved in deforestation. It ignored the fact that politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro would simply change their domestic legislation to grant legal status to what had previously been illegally deforested land, and so get round the Act’s intention.
The failure to impose adequate due diligence on companies, banks and finance houses and institutions has meant that, since the Glasgow declaration, UK banks have provided more than £1 billion to companies that present a forest risk. Last July, UK investors still held £1.4 billion-worth of assets and shares issued by these companies. The largest 50 of those investors make up 99% of the total UK forest-risk investments, yet 18 of them were actually signatories to the net zero asset managers initiative. Sadly, just eight have made any clear public commitment to eventually removing deforestation from their portfolios. That leaves 42 that should be ashamed of themselves.
Three names stand out, but for all the wrong reasons: HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered. Between them, those three banks have provided 97% of the £4.5 billion-worth of credit lines for forest-risk companies since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. It is not just in government where there is a gap between policy and action. In 2017, HSBC committed
“not to provide services to customers either directly or indirectly involved in deforestation”.
In fact, it has provided credit lines amounting to £1.9 billion to forest-risk companies such as JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which, despite a record of corruption and forest destruction, just last week was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission to list on the New York stock exchange, giving it access to new sources of finance and capital markets. It is, of course, just a few months since JBS dropped its net zero by 2040 climate pledge, claiming, “Well, it was never a formal commitment.”
The Environment Act was an important marker that the UK takes seriously its role in the global supply chain, and that it wants to lead the way and manage the responsibility that comes with it. But a marker only stands in place of action for so long. Four years later, it has become an ironic sign of failure.
UK financial institutions continue to bankroll deforestation. Trade agreements lack meaningful environmental safeguards, and indigenous land defenders face daily violence and intimidation. Unsustainable logging fuels forest destruction; weak governance and corruption continue; and infrastructure projects and mining operations further encroach on forested lands, fragmenting ecosystems and threatening indigenous territories. Land tenure insecurity, poor enforcement and a lack of economic alternatives all conspire to make deforestation a systemic problem.
There can be no one silver bullet but, my goodness, there must be a desire to start. With COP30 this November being hosted in Brazil, there is a compelling case to move from intention to delivery. First, the Minister knows only too well that we must urgently expand the due diligence regime to cover all forest-risk commodities, whether legal or illegal, under producer country law. We should introduce criminal liability for companies knowingly profiting from deforestation, and require UK banks and investors to disclose their deforestation risk.
There will need to be a phased timeline, but my question is not when it will be done but why it has not been done already. If we understand where the blockage in the machinery is, perhaps we can help apply a bit of pressure to assist the Minister in getting it done. I know she will be keen to do so. Some say the blockage is in the Cabinet Office, some say Northern Ireland and the Windsor framework. I would point out to the Minister and her ministerial colleagues that the strong due diligence measures of the European deforestation legislation are due to come into force in December this year. It would be best if the regulation of the whole of the UK were consonant with that. Will the Minister set out a clear timeline for the full implementation of schedule 17 to the Environment Act?
Secondly, the UK must champion a trade model that values environmental protection and human rights. As the UK is in advanced trade negotiations with the EU and India, and to a lesser extent with the USA, what discussions has the Minister had with her colleagues in the Department for Business and Trade about the need to embed deforestation safeguards and environmental standards in all future trade agreements? I immodestly recommend to her the blueprint set out in the Labour party’s green paper of 2018, entitled, “Just Trading: What would a just trading system look like?”, when I was shadow Trade Secretary.
Thirdly, the tropical forests forever facility—TFFF—championed by Brazil, will inevitably assume centre stage as we progress towards Belém and COP30. By using arbitrage between the cost of long-dated Government bonds and loans and the returns of a more diversified portfolio, the TFFF fund seeks to provide a long-term payment for conservation and restoration of tropical forests. The facility would help to address a significant market failure, placing a value to the ecosystem services that those forests provide, and returning that to the forest communities that curate them.
Will the Minister tell us how the UK will be involved in the TFFF? What conversations has she had with colleagues in international development? How will the fund prioritise and reward the role of indigenous and traditional knowledge partners in forest stewardship? She knows that indigenous peoples need specific legal protections, recognition and direct funding. Forests thrive when indigenous rights are upheld. Our aid and climate finance must prioritise those locally led solutions. That is fundamental, not just for nature and climate mitigation, but for justice, for addressing poverty and for human rights.
The establishment at the convention on biological diversity COP16 meeting in Rome of the Cali fund, which commits 50% of its resources to indigenous communities, was an overdue recognition of their role as custodians of forests and the nature and biodiversity that make them. I ask the Minister to update the House about the steps our Government are taking to help operationalise that fund, and to ensure that its resources reach those local communities quickly and without loss. Can she tell us whether and how indigenous communities are represented on the fund’s board of management, and how the Cali fund will work alongside the TFFF? Is the UK planning to invest in the TFFF, and now with the 40% cut in official development assistance from 0.5% to just 0.3% of GNI, what will happen to the £11.6 billion that was ringfenced for climate in ICF3, and the £3 billion within that that was further ringfenced for nature?
After years of declining indicators, we now have an opportunity to reverse the trend of deforestation. I am proud of the direction that our Labour Government have taken since July, from creating a special envoy for nature to committing to deliver three new national forests. Domestically, the Government are investing up to £400 million in tree planting and peatland restoration over 2024-25 and 2025-26. However, if we are to lead globally we must also act globally, and that includes how we mobilise capital. Public funding is crucial, but on its own it is not enough. We need to unlock private finance to support conservation and sustainable development, especially in regions safeguarding the planet’s remaining great forests, and that means scaling up tools such as green bonds, blended finance and debt-for-nature swaps. The City of London can and should be a hub for that kind of innovation, not only for climate finance, but for nature-positive finance.
We sometimes hear the environment and the economy pitted against each other, as if nature is a subset of the economy. Of course the truth is the other way round, because without nature and the ecosystem services that it provides, there is no economy, and the most vital part of that nature is our amazing forests.
Several hon. Members rose—
Martin Vickers (in the Chair)
Order. I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called to speak in the debate. I will not impose a formal time limit at the moment, but I will be calling the Front-Bench speakers at 10.28 am. Jim Shannon will show us how it is done.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers—you have set me a challenge, and it is one I will adhere to. I thank the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for opening this debate. During my time in this Parliament he has always shown himself to be enthusiastic and energetic on these subjects. He always speaks with a knowledge that I appreciate—I think we all do, to be fair—and today he has exemplified that incredibly well. I thank him for that, and for reminding us all, including me, of the importance of such debates.
Deforestation poses, and indeed has posed, a massive global issue for quite some time. It was sad to listen to the hon. Gentleman’s opening remarks and the issues raised, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister about a way forward, just as we always look to getting things right and doing better. I would also like to give some insight into our local situation. I know this debate is about global deforestation, but perhaps I can give some facts about back home, as that adds to what we are doing here on deforestation.
Approximately 8.6% of Northern Ireland’s land is covered by woodland, which is among the lowest in Europe. Between 2000 and 2023, Northern Ireland lost some 21,700 hectares of natural forest, representing an 11% decrease, so there is more that we can do back home. I declare an interest as a landowner and a farmer. Some 15, or perhaps 20 years ago, we planted 4,500 trees, so that is the small part that I and my family played on this issue. Storms take their toll, but I am glad that out of 4,500 trees we lost only 12, and they have been replaced. That is what we do.
The United Kingdom has approximately 3.25 million hectares of woodland, accounting for about 13% of its total land area. The impacts of deforestation are often underestimated. The Environmental Audit Committee, which has done an incredible job, concluded that forests hold some 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and support the livelihood of 1.6 billion people. That is 25% of the world’s population, so forests are incredibly important for a quarter of the world’s population. They also support the livelihood of 90% of the world’s population who live in extreme poverty, so the impact upon them is greater than ever. Those people depend on forests for some part of their livelihood. Poverty is a massive issue around the globe, and ultimately, once forests and trees are removed, the resources that thousands of people required to survive are destroyed. We have just been reminded about that 500-year-old tree in London that was cut down. When we cut it down, we cannot just grow it the next day. There is a court case ongoing, so I will not be saying too much, but when a tree is cut down, it cannot just be planted the next day and got back to where it was. Those are the things that we must remember—the resources that thousands of people require to survive are destroyed.
The same report stated that we, the United Kingdom, are a significant consumer of commodities linked to deforestation. I gently remind us all that the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds estimated that UK imports of forest-risk commodities, such as soy, beef, leather and coca, account for a land footprint equivalent to 88% of the UK in size every year, which is massively huge. Just think of what that means to all of us in this world today. Our responsibility is not just for ourselves, but for others, and not just our constituents—who our first obligation is to—and our families, but to the world family.
We have made progress through the Conference of the Parties in the past, but it is evident that there is still so much more to be done to have maximum impact. It is important to take our forest-risk commodities into consideration and analyse what impact they are having on other countries across the globe. That is part of our responsibility as a caring nation and a compassionate people. That can be done collectively within our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but also working alongside our NATO partners.
I look forward to hearing from the Minister what our Government can do in this place to ensure progress, not only with the commitment to our global partners—we must continue to work with them, and do so more effectively—but by taking into consideration the benefits of maintaining good forestation in our own country, for the sake of our environment and climate change commitments.
Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for securing this debate. It is a really important issue, which looms large over us.
I want to talk about one specific project that could be absolutely devastating for the global climate and biodiversity. We always talk about the Amazon, but the world’s third largest rainforest is on the island of Papua, in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. A huge shadow looms over Indonesia’s forests. We have seen recent media coverage in the British, Indonesian and international press about an initiative that has been described as the world’s largest deforestation project. That project, backed directly by the Indonesian Government, is targeting 3 million hectares of moist tropical forest, dry forest, mangrove and wetland for conversion to huge commercial rice and sugar cane plantations in the district of Merauke, West Papua. That is an area one and a half times the size of Wales—or, as there are so many Members, including myself, with strong Yorkshire connections, three Yorkshires. Similar projects in Borneo and Sumatra are threatening orangutans, tigers and other critically endangered species.
Battalions of soldiers from the Indonesian military have been deployed to clear land and quell resistance from local and indigenous communities, many of whom strongly oppose the project but lack the rights and means to protest. West Papua, in particular, is a highly militarised territory, which is effectively under military occupation and rule. Community leaders who object face violence and intimidation in a landscape already marred by a conflict that is now 60 years old. The communities are also not even being recompensed properly for the land. There are reports that some communities are being forced to sell concessions within the state plantation for £5 an acre. The value of the timber alone should make the land worth many hundred times that.
Indonesia has a long history of failed mega-projects. Similar mega-projects failed in the past because draining wetlands makes the soil more acidic and farming more difficult. Once cleared, vast stretches of forest are abandoned and burned, as we have previously seen in the Amazon. Indigenous people rely on natural forests for hunting and gathering, and burn waste wood for cooking, so the practice increases malnutrition and disease, and affects the whole lifestyle of indigenous people.
From an environmental point of view, the project will destroy globally critical habitats, triggering irreversible ecosystem degradation on a vast scale. It is estimated that this one project in Papua will release an estimated 782.5 million tonnes of additional CO2, which is equivalent to a carbon loss valued at £2.1 billion. That means that the Merauke food and energy estate alone could more than double Indonesia’s emissions.
Like the UK, Indonesia is signed up to the Paris agreement and COP, as well as to the CBD protocols. The astonishing impact of the project threatens to completely undo any progress Indonesia has made in reducing deforestation and undermine the UK Government’s efforts to help the country to drive down forest loss and meet its climate targets. Some 10,000 hectares of land have already been destroyed, but that is a minute amount compared with what we could see.
Where does the UK come in? In November 2024, the UK and Indonesian Governments agreed to work together in on new strategic partnership, which they stated is designed to provide
“a framework, grounded in the principles of mutual respect and cooperation, to deliver the full potential of our relationship”.
The partnership will engage
“our respective businesses, academia and research institutions, cultural organisations and wider societies.”
In addition to having closer political, economic and societal ties, Indonesia is an important partner for the UK in advancing our shared global climate commitments, particularly with regard to the protection of forests. Through programmes such as the forestry, land use and governance programme, the UK is working with Indonesia to address deforestation and promote sustainable forest management to combat climate change. The work is critical and has contributed to a significant decrease in deforestation since 2020. I pay tribute to the former Minister Lord Goldsmith, with whom I have discussed this matter many times, including at COPs.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brent West mentioned schedule 17 to the Environment Act 2021. When it is finally implemented, it should ensure that products that contain palm oil or cocoa that have been grown on recently deforested land such as Merauke—palm oil and cocoa could well end up being grown there, because the land is not at all suitable for rice growing—are not sold in the UK. That is the intent behind schedule 17, and its implementation is long overdue.
My hon. Friend also made the point that responsibility for this matter sits across a number of Departments, but as we are in a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs debate, I will address my questions to the DEFRA Minister. Given the new partnership framework with Indonesia, and the UK’s status as a respectful but critical friend of Indonesia, do the Government intend to provide technical analysis, advice and support to help the Indonesian Government to find ways of meeting the country’s food and energy needs that do not require setting off such a climate time bomb as the Merauke project? Given the UK’s global forests agenda, its leadership role in the Glasgow declaration, and existing trade partnerships, does the Minister believe this is an opportunity for the UK Government to take diplomatic action regarding this colossal project, given not just its implications for deforestation but its devastating impact on indigenous communities?
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner)—in this case, he is a friend—on raising a matter of paramount importance that will affect the future of our children and grandchildren. I am fortunate enough to have five of the latter. I decided to participate in this debate having yesterday received a work of fiction, in the form of a briefing note from the Drax organisation. I also had the good fortune yesterday to meet two charming ladies, Dr Krystal Martin and Katherine Egland, both from the United State of Mississippi, where Drax has an operation that is hugely impacting their lives and their communities.
I am a simple man and I find long equations hard to follow, but it strikes me that if someone fells carbon-sequestering trees, using power to do so, and if they turn the wood into pellets, using power, transport those pellets across the United States, by either water or land, and then transport those pellets across the Atlantic in diesel-powered boats, the chances are that they are using quite a lot of carbon. It strikes me that Drax’s claim that its operation is somehow carbon-friendly has to be a myth.
One of my wiser colleagues reminded me that, for Drax, the clock starts ticking when the pellets arrive at the power station gates, and everything that goes before is written off. This is an absolute nonsense. It was subsidised by the British taxpayer to a considerable extent under the previous Government. To give credit where it is due, the current Government have secured a rather better deal than the previous one. Nevertheless, these practices are still being subsidised to a ridiculous extent.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
First, I would like to correct the record, because the right hon. Gentleman is anything but simple. He has always been a leading light in every debate he contributes to. In my constituency we reclaim wood that would have otherwise gone into landfill and turn it into pellets, but unfortunately the Government subsidy for that is about to end, making the situation the right hon. Gentleman describes ever more perverse.
Sir Roger Gale
The hon. Lady makes an unassailable point.
This should not be happening. Drax is felling trees in the southern states of the United States—in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana—and throughout Canada on an unimaginable scale. The people at Drax claim that they are using pulp wood from
“thinnings that help to open up the forest canopy and get light onto the forest floor”.
Oh no they are not! They are engaged in scorched-earth forestry. They are felling acres and acres of woodland in the southern United States and Canada, and that is not acceptable. And it is being subsidised by the British Government. Worse still, the health of the local populations in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi is being directly and adversely affected by Drax’s practices.
Drax has lied—there is no other word for it—to secure its contracts and licences. I shall do my damnedest to ensure that the renewal of those licences is contested in every way. I urge the Minister to go back to her Government, particularly the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, to expose the myth that is Drax, and to insist that we must find viable alternatives—not tomorrow, but now.
Martin Vickers (in the Chair)
If hon. Members restrict their speeches to four minutes, we will fit everyone in.
Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) on securing this important debate. When I worked for UK Steel, it was always a pleasure to get in touch with him about carbon sequestration from steel, and it is a pleasure to speak with him now on the subject of deforestation.
Deforestation does not simply cut down trees: it cuts off food chains, collapses ecosystems and drives animals from their homes. It is, as the right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) said, a global crisis that will have impacts that reverberate down the generations. It is a devastating loss to our planet that up to 15 billion trees are cut down every year right around the world, and it does not only destroy the homes of vital species. I put on the record my thanks to Northumberland College at Kirkley Hall zoo, which kindly hosted me after my election to talk about its great work in preserving biodiversity. Deforestation is contributing hugely to the deeply concerning examples of climate change that we are seeing.
I also put on the record my support for the responsible forestry industry—I have a lot of it in my Hexham constituency, where I see the jobs, employment and certainty it provides to local communities—and recognise the great Northumberland forest plan to plant millions of trees, which has commanded genuine cross-party support in my part of the world. I am conscious that we have local elections on Thursday, but we can get together with the Tory group at Morpeth and recognise that they do have some good ideas occasionally.
We need to recognise that we cannot fight climate change simply by sacrificing biodiversity. In fact, we need to embrace it. We are stripping away the lungs of our planet and the homes of irreplaceable wildlife, sacrificing the Amazon and other great forests at the altar of industrial agriculture, as land is carved out for cattle and soy at the expense of our planet’s future.
I am conscious that the Minister will not be able to speak on issues that affect the Department for Business and Trade, but I urge her, when she has the relevant conversations, not just to look at how we preserve and protect our high food standards. When we look at UK Government procurement, we should look at transport and the other emissions incurred by goods that are brought out of the planet using suboptimal methods, and ensure that, wherever possible, we use the best methods for getting products into the UK and make sure they are produced to a high standard, wherever they come from. That comes up in my inbox an awful lot.
I feel incredibly fortunate to have grown up surrounded by the Northumberland landscape. We must preserve such landscapes not just in Northumberland but around the world. We must protect our climate and confront deforestation head on. I note the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West, and from other hon. Members who have far more experience of this than I do, about the practices of certain large corporations.
To touch briefly on my previous life working in the steel sector, timber and lumber are products that sequester carbon far more effectively. We need to have a truly honest conversation with ourselves about how the 1.5 million new homes target can be achieved using products that are far kinder to the environment, that provide jobs here at home and that provide environmental benefits right across the world.
Lillian Jones (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers, and to speak in this debate. I put on the record that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the wood panel industry.
Our global forests are not just the world’s lungs but help to manage the worst effects of climate change. They lock in carbon, maintain biodiversity and help to manage flooding. The UK’s domestic forestry planting has been in decline since the ’70s, when it peaked at 30,000 hectares per year. Given the length of time required for a tree to grow to maturity, this is an issue that we need to consider now. The UK Government have committed to planting 30,000 hectares per annum by 2030, which is to be welcomed. Although 20,500 hectares of newly created woodland were reported across the UK in 2023-24, we also need to consider the different types of forestry planting and the importance of both productive commercial forestry and broadleaf.
Manufacturing from timber is an important form of carbon sequestration. Whereas recent statistics show a year-on-year increase in forestry planting, the amount of productive forestry has decreased by 4.5%. That limits the ability of the wood panel industry, among others, to meet customer demand. It can currently meet only 65% of customer demand from domestic sources. If the industry had a secure supply, it would be able to satisfy 100% of demand. To reduce our reliance on exports, the UK and devolved Governments must achieve their tree-planting targets and commit to 60% of new planting being made up of productive species such as conifers.
Wood panel products manufactured in the UK recycle waste wood into everyday products in our homes, such as kitchens, cabinets and furniture. The volume of waste wood used for energy sources such as woody biomass has increased substantially over the last decade, and that limits the waste wood available to the wood panel industry and other wood recycling industries.
The wood panel industry is a British manufacturing success story, with British products made from British timber supplying the UK’s biggest brands, such as B&Q, Jewson, Wickes and Howdens. The industry is also one of the UK’s most productive manufacturing sectors, at two and half times more productive than the UK industrial average, and it generates an estimated annual turnover of £1.4 billion. The wood panel industry generates £287 million for the Exchequer annually, through production taxes across the industry and its supply chain, taxes from employee spending, and income tax, as well as national insurance contributions.
More tree planting will help the industry to become self-sufficient, reduce imports and be better for the environment. However, the failure to meet tree-planting targets risks direct job losses in the forestry, nursery and silviculture sectors. Indirectly, it threatens employment in wood processing, environmental services and rural economies. Reduced timber supply and weakened climate commitments may also deter investment, undermining long-term job security and economic sustainability in related industries.
Anna Gelderd (South East Cornwall) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. As co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on global deforestation, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for bringing this important topic to Parliament today, and for being a strong voice championing our environment for many years. Protecting and restoring forests around the world is not just about climate and nature, although those are vital. It is also about safeguarding communities and livelihoods, both globally and here in the UK.
It has been nearly four years since the Environment Act passed into law, but we are still waiting for one of its most crucial elements: the implementation of schedule 17 and the due diligence regulations needed to ensure that UK supply chains are no longer linked to illegal deforestation abroad. British consumers want to know that when they spend their hard-earned pounds they are part of the solution, not the problem. People in South East Cornwall want to be part of building a cleaner, brighter future.
Once enacted, the regulations will make it unlawful for large businesses operating in the UK to use products not produced in accordance with local laws in their country of origin. They will require businesses to establish due diligence systems to assess and mitigate risks, and to report with transparency on their findings. Since the Environment Act was passed, UK imports alone have been linked to over 39,000 hectares of deforestation. To put that into context, there are more MPs in this House than there are Sumatran tigers left on earth—that is a crisis.
Forests are the green lungs of our planet, and alongside our oceans they absorb vast amounts of the carbon dioxide emitted across the world every day, every month and every year. They hold 80% of the world’s land-based biodiversity and support the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people globally. I know that this Government are supportive of nature—and of the efforts to protect and restore our natural spaces—and forest dwellers and economic development. But we need greater clarity on when these regulations will be introduced and how they will meet our global commitments to halt and reverse deforestation.
Some British businesses are already trying to do the right thing, but they need clear and consistent rules. The public is with us too. Polling by the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that 70% of British people support Government action to prevent the sale of products linked to those activities.
Moving forward, we have to be fair and inclusive. The UK forest-risk commodities regulation could inadvertently harm smallholder farmers within global supply chains, many of whom are already struggling. We must ensure that the policy empowers rather than excludes, and that it promotes fair compliance costs, living incomes and meaningful engagement with producers, especially those without formal land titles.
Closer to home, we must ensure that the changes do not increase food costs for UK households at a time when many are already struggling. Public food procurement, which accounts for £2.4 billion every year, must support our environmental goals, not undermine them. Public pounds spent should help deliver on climate and nature protection. That is what both the public and the Government want.
Farmers both here and abroad are part of that solution. In South East Cornwall we are proud of those brilliant farmers working every day to feed our communities and steward our land. Agriculture must be part of that sustainable future, and that means supporting practices that restore nature. We know that UK action alone is not enough to protect forests. We must work in lockstep with key partners such as Brazil, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others to keep forests standing. The bilateral relationships between the UK and our global partners are key.
Brazil is home to a third of the world’s remaining primary tropical forests and will host COP30 in November. Reports of forests being felled to build roads for that climate summit in Belém are alarming, as is the extent to which human activities are impacting on the summit. Unless we can make progress at COP30 on enforcing supply chain rules and holding financial institutions accountable, our window of opportunity to end forest loss is at risk of closing. Will the Minister confirm that the Government, while supporting the Brazilian presidency, will take on that huge task and ensure that they push for the most ambitious outcomes on forest protection?
I also want to see a mention of joint action on global deforestation included in the recent UK-China climate dialogue. I understand that the Government will launch a new UK-China environment dialogue later this year, which is another good opportunity to have that issue mentioned. Will the Minister confirm that she will discuss that point with the Chinese?
Recently, I was proud to meet members of the public from the Congo who are calling on their Government to halt oil and gas expansion. Given the announcement by the DRC’s oil Minister, will the Minister assure Members that work will be done with partners in key global areas to safeguard the Congo basin’s future? Time is not on our side, so when will the Government introduce the long overdue legislation to implement schedule 17 and ensure that the UK is part of the bright future that has been discussed today?
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your guidance, Mr Vickers, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for securing this debate. It is very poignant to have it on the day that the Climate Change Committee is saying that we will not reach our climate targets.
I will focus on building on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd). It is an important issue and one on which the United Kingdom can demonstrate real leadership: tackling illegal deforestation linked to the UK supply chain.
In the Environment Act 2021, Parliament rightly included a requirement for due diligence provisions to prevent larger businesses from using forest-risk commodities that contribute to illegal deforestation. Those regulations are crucial to our meeting our commitments to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. Yet today, more than 1,100 days have passed since the consultation on implementation closed, and the due diligence regulations remain unpublished and unimplemented. Every hour that passes, an area of rainforest equivalent in size to 300 football pitches is cleared, often to make way for unsustainable agricultural practices. Such destruction not only exacerbates climate change but pushes precious wildlife, such as orangutans, tigers, rhinoceroses, hornbills and elephants, towards extinction. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall said, there are now more MPs in Westminster than there are Sumatran tigers left alive on Earth, which is a sobering and powerful reminder of what is at stake with this issue.
As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for zoos and aquariums, I am pleased that Chester zoo, one of the world’s leading conservation organisations, has been at the forefront of efforts to champion sustainable palm oil and combat deforestation. The zoo is leading the way in creating the world’s first sustainable palm oil city in Chester, and it has worked with plantation owners in Malaysian Borneo to restore over 200 hectares of rainforest, reconnecting fragmented landscapes and protecting our critical wildlife corridors.
Chester zoo’s real and practical experience makes it an invaluable voice on this issue, so it is no surprise that DEFRA officials have previously visited the zoo to consult its experts and even filmed content for what was intended to be the public launch of the regulations. That launch was postponed due to the general election, but the fact that it was planned proves that the due diligence regulation is sitting on a desk somewhere, waiting to be published.
The delay in publication and implementation risks sending entirely the wrong message to businesses seeking certainty, to our international partners and to the public, who rightly expect us to lead on this issue. Chester zoo, alongside other organisations, is calling not for endless revisions of proposals but for the Government to introduce their version of the regulations without further delay.
Just last week, the EU proposed adapting its deforestation regulations to streamline their implementation. In my view, that shows that the UK Government should move faster on implementing their regulations to create certainty on this issue. A practical, balanced approach would be for the Government to conduct a formal review 12 months after implementation, which would allow us to address any operational challenges and assess the compatibility of the regulations with the EU’s deforestation regulations.
This is a moment when we can turn our commitments into reality. Introducing the regulations now would honour the spirit of the Environment Act, provide businesses with much needed clarity, and show that the United Kingdom remains determined to protect the world’s precious forests and wildlife. I urge the Minister to act swiftly and to ensure that trusted voices such as Chester zoo and the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums—the membership body for zoos—are included in any future reviews, so that the regulations are grounded in real conservation and operational experience.
Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I thank the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) for securing this debate and for giving us such an educational introduction. It is notable that all Members have spoken not just with passion but with rare unanimity on this topic.
Forests are not merely scenic landscapes; they are the lungs of our planet, absorbing more than 7.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. They house more than 80% of our biodiversity and support the livelihoods of more than 1.6 billion people globally, including many of the world’s poorest communities, yet the World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that we are losing around 15 billion trees every year. That is a direct threat to our climate targets, our food security and our global stability.
World Animal Protection notes that, as president of COP26, the UK introduced the Glasgow leaders’ declaration on forests and land use, but has made little progress in the years since. At COP29, leaders reaffirmed the goal to end deforestation by 2030. We were proud to support that pledge, but words must become action. A number of my constituents, including the children of Old Sodbury primary school, have contacted me to express their concern about deforestation. They highlighted the plight of orangutans and the damage being done by people who are destroying forests in order to grow palm trees for the palm oil used in soap, shampoo, chocolate and many other toiletries and food. I am sure that they will be pleased to have heard a number of hon. Members express concern about orangutans in this debate.
A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) and South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), set out clearly the damaging impacts of deforestation, including soil acidification, vast carbon emissions and the damage to people who depend on those forests, including some of the poorest in the world. The new Labour Government have pledged stronger regulations to prevent UK businesses from fuelling illegal deforestation through their supply chains but, as the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) set out, every day of delay allows more trees, and the species that rely on them, to be destroyed. Will the Minister tell us when the Government will put forward the regulations?
The Liberal Democrats would support the introduction of a business, human rights and environment Act to require companies to take adequate measures and conduct due diligence to prevent and manage the impacts of activities on people and the environment, both in the UK and around the world. Will the Minister go further and introduce a general duty of care for the environment and human rights to require companies, financial institutions and public sector agencies to exercise due diligence in avoiding specified products, such as commodities produced with deforestation, in their operations and supply chains, and to report on their actions?
The right hon. Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) raised the issue of Drax. I had a robust conversation with proponents of biomass energy production at one of the many drop-ins in Parliament. That case illustrates why we need to look at whole-life-cycle emissions, not simply consumption emissions, as the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) pointed out. Under the previous Conservative Government, the UK continued to subsidise biomass energy production, particularly at the Drax power station. It burns the equivalent of 27 million trees a year and, although it is classed as renewable under current definitions, that is both inefficient and ecologically damaging. The Lib Dems oppose the continued classification of biomass as renewable energy and would like the Government to change that so that we can focus on genuine renewables such as wind and solar.
We should not forget the problems on our own doorstep, and I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for giving us a Northern Ireland perspective on this. The Woodland Trust has said that, here in England, we have some of the lowest woodland cover in Europe at just 10%, far behind the European average of 38%. In my constituency, where the Liberal Democrats lead on the climate and nature emergency, the council is part of a partnership that has won a bid for the western forest to become a new national forest. It will serve more than 2.5 million people, and the aim is to plant 2,500 hectares of new woodland in the first five years, with an aspiration to plant 20 million trees by 2050. Last year, the Liberal Democrats committed to doubling woodland cover by 2050, and I hope that aspiration will make a contribution to our policy. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) made the good point that the types of planting are important.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that protecting and restoring forests is essential to limiting warming to 1.5°, and organisations from the World Wildlife Fund to the Tree Council have warned us that delay is no longer an option. Forests do not recognise borders, and neither does climate change. To protect nature, we must act globally, act boldly and act now. According to the UN, we lose approximately 10 million hectares of forest a year—an area roughly the size of Portugal. As a result of the previous Conservative Government’s policies, the World Wildlife Fund and Global Forest Watch rank the UK in the bottom third of G7 nations for its overall progress on halting imported deforestation.
The COP29 declaration reaffirmed the global goal of ending deforestation by 2030. This is not a distant crisis; it is happening now and it threatens us all. I call on the Government to act with urgency and vision, stop subsidising environmental destruction, implement rigorous supply chain standards and work with global partners to safeguard forests around the world. The world cannot afford half-measures. We need real action to stop deforestation now.
Dr Neil Hudson (Epping Forest) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank everyone for their important contributions, and I am grateful to my good friend, the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), for bringing forward this important debate. I have extremely fond memories of our time serving together as members of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in the previous Parliament.
Caring deeply about the world we live in, our precious environment and the people and the creatures that live within it unites us in humanity across this Chamber. Given the hon. Gentleman’s clear and passionate commitment to the natural environment, it is no surprise that he has chosen to bring this topic to Westminster Hall. I thank him again for doing so and congratulate him on his thoughtful and powerful speech.
There have been excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the House, including from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). The hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) talked powerfully about what is going on in Indonesia. My right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) made a powerful speech about the implications of Drax. We heard from the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) and for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones). The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) is a powerful advocate of the work of Chester zoo, which I will talk about later.
As the Member of Parliament for Epping Forest, it is an honour to speak for His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition on protecting our precious forest. My constituents know of Epping Forest’s important role as the heart and lungs for north-east London and our part of Essex.
As Members highlighted, it is vital that we address the drivers and risks of global deforestation. Deforestation is the second leading cause of climate change globally, and is responsible for approximately 10% to 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions—nearly as much as all the world’s vehicles combined. To put it starkly, if deforestation were a country, it would rank third behind only China and the USA for carbon dioxide emissions.
Forests host approximately 80% of the world’s wildlife on land. In the last 60 years, more than half of tropical forests globally have been destroyed, reducing biodiversity and endangering species. Alarmingly, it is estimated that every hour—less than the length of this debate—an area of rainforest equivalent to 300 football pitches is cleared to make way for unsustainable palm oil production. That not only contributes to climate change but leads to a huge decline in precious wildlife such as orangutans, tigers and elephants, jeopardising their very survival as species.
I thank and pay tribute to Chester zoo, which does great work, and indeed all zoos across the world for their work on conservation species. Chester zoo has worked on a responsible sourcing policy for the use of sustainable palm oil produced with the lowest possible environmental impact and without deforestation.
The facts and figures we have heard today are truly shocking and leave us in no doubt about the urgent need to tackle deforestation and the threat it poses to us leaving the world in a cleaner, greener state than we found it. Although there have been positive steps in the right direction in recent years, including a significant reduction in deforestation in some countries, there is still clearly much to do.
For example, a 2024 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation found that while deforestation rates have declined in forest-rich countries such as Brazil and Indonesia—but there are still problems there, we must remember—
“climate change is making forests more vulnerable to abiotic and biotic stressors such as wildfires and pests”.
With demand for wood projected to significantly increase by 2050, it is more important than ever that the Government ensure that the UK continues to play a leading role in protecting the world’s forests.
As the Minister will know, I am proud that the previous Conservative Government had a strong record on tackling deforestation, both at home and abroad, cementing the UK’s position as a global leader. We passed the landmark Environment Act 2021 and supported the recovery of England’s globally rare temperate rainforests, while playing an important role in supporting efforts to reduce global deforestation. In the Amazon, for example, under the previous Government, the UK became one of the largest contributors to Brazil’s Amazon fund and supported measures to address the underlying drivers of deforestation.
That is not to mention the important work that we spearheaded during the UK’s COP26 presidency, including securing a commitment from 141 countries, representing more than 90% of the world’s forests, to work collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030. We have heard that those commitments were made, but we need to hold people to account on that. I was privileged to attend COP26 and see the previous Government in action, working hard on the global stage to tackle deforestation and looking more widely at sustainable ways of using our land, including in agriculture, and making those ways more affordable and achievable across the world. International co-operation is the only way that countries across the world can tackle the threat to our planet and livelihoods that deforestation and climate change more widely pose.
Furthermore, at the COP28 nature day in December 2023, the Conservative Government set out plans to ensure that supermarket essentials are no longer linked to illegal deforestation. I would be grateful if the Minister could provide an update on that important work, and on the Government’s plans to ensure that the UK continues to lead international action to protect the planet’s forests.
Experts recently warned that Governments must take immediate steps if we are to meet the important commitment to restore the world’s forests by 2030, with a key recommendation that countries must strengthen trade agreements and regulations to stop deforestation-linked products from entering global markets. What assessment has the Minister made of such reports? What plans does her Department have to ensure that the UK is promoting deforestation-free trade?
Speaking of upholding our environmental standards worldwide in our agreements and trade, it is important that we likewise uphold other standards in trade agreements, such as animal welfare standards, not least in the current negotiations with the United States. We must hold firm on banning the importation of chlorine-washed poultry, ractopamine-fed pork and hormone-treated beef and dairy. These are red lines, not only for the sake of animal and bird welfare, but for our fantastic UK farmers, who farm to the highest standards of animal welfare, and must not be undercut in an attempt to cut a deal.
This is about not protectionism, but standing up for our values. In that, we, the United Kingdom, can be a beacon to the world by driving up animal health and welfare standards globally. Can the Minister confirm that the current Government will do all they can to uphold environmental and animal welfare standards internationally in their international trade negotiations?
Returning to global deforestation, the previous Government introduced world-leading due diligence provisions to help to address illegal deforestation across UK supply chains through our groundbreaking Environment Act. Ministers in the current Government have said that they will set out an approach to ensure that UK consumption of so-called forest-risk commodities, such as beef, soy and palm oil, is not driving deforestation. They have said that they will do that “in due course”, but they are yet to do so. Can the Minister provide an update on that today? Will she confirm whether the Government plan to introduce the necessary secondary legislation to enact measures in the Environment Act in key areas such as schedule 17?
As the Minister will be aware, campaigners are urging the Government to introduce such secondary legislation before COP30 this November. That is spurred on by recent reports that the UK’s imports of forest-risk commodities are linked to the destruction of forests the size of major cities such as Newcastle, Liverpool or Cardiff over the past year. I acknowledge that the process has not been without its difficulties, but will the Minister set out a timeline for introducing the necessary secondary legislation?
Finally, I would like to mention forest finance. The previous Government doubled the UK’s commitment to international climate finance to £11.6 billion from 2021-22 to 2025-26. ICF has been an important part of the UK’s work to protect the world’s forests, enabling us to work side by side with Brazil to tackle deforestation in all nine Amazon states, and to carefully monitor deforestation across the Amazon region. As we know, the Government recently announced a reduction in funding for overseas development, but they have yet to give details of the projects and initiatives that they will be funding. It is therefore unclear what, if any, projects relating to the rainforests, biodiversity and the protection of sensitive ecosystems the UK Government will support. What engagement has the Minister had with colleagues in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office about such funding, and will she shed light on the Government’s funding priorities with regard to tackling global deforestation?
In conclusion, there is a clear consensus across the House that serious cross-party efforts must be taken to address the threat of global deforestation around the world. While much has been done, much more still needs to be done by the Government and in collaboration with nations around the world to protect our precious environment, the people and the creatures that live within it. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about how the Government intend to pick up the baton from the previous Conservative Government and deliver those global environmental protections for the sake of our planet, and for generations to come.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) on securing this debate on such an important issue, and on taking us to the Amazon forest and its atmospheric river. That was a brilliantly poetic way to talk about the aerial rivers that forests produce, and an important way of explaining ecosystem services. We sometimes talk about the forest as if it is an economic asset, which of course it is, but we are not very good at the poetry.
We know that trees bring us peace, shade and joy, as well as all the other stuff. It is important that we talk about the emotional and spiritual connections that trees bring to people and to places, and the threats that they face from deforestation, whether legal or illegal. I very much take my hon. Friend’s point about illegal versus legal deforestation, which is an observation that I also noted about the previous Government’s approach.
This nation is afforesting, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) stated. We are planting a new national forest, the Western forest, which the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young) mentioned. Indeed, I was delighted to go there and plant a crab apple tree as part of the agroforestry part of that. The forest will deliver flood prevention services and, critically, link up ancient woodland, which has become fragmented in the landscape. It will stretch from the Forest of Dean right down to the Mendip hills—a truly massive undertaking.
We are here to talk about deforestation, which is an issue that touches on many different Departments, including the Departments for Business and Trade, and for Energy Security and Net Zero—I have a DESNZ official with me in the Box, as well as officials from DEFRA. That three Ministers are responsible for international forestry—those from FCDO, DESNZ and myself—shows the complexity around this issue, and explains why I have about 25 different notes in my hand. I do have a prepared speech, which I will try to deliver, but I will also try to answer questions as we go along. If Members feel that we are getting to five to 11 and they have not had satisfaction, I ask them to intervene on me, but I will try to get through my notes.
First, tackling the climate and nature crises is central to the UK’s national interest, for both security and prosperity. Our forests are a strategic asset, and protecting them is fundamental to achieving the Government’s vision for a world free from poverty on a liveable planet. As my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West said, nature is the monopoly provider of everything that we need to exist. It is not a subsection of the economy; the economy is a subsection of nature.
More than 1 billion people rely on forests for sustenance and their livelihoods. We have heard, in the many passionate and brilliant speeches from colleagues, that forests provide food, energy, water and medicines worldwide and play a vital role in global economic resilience. They host most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, including the slightly terrifying giant otters from the Amazon that we can see at Chester zoo. I have never seen anything like them—they are utterly terrifying animals, like something out of “Jurassic Park”, the size of a Great Dane and quite terrifying for those of us who are used to the more manageable British otter.
Forests contain rare and endangered species and, of course, plants that are essential for modern medicines. Almost everything we have, whether aspirin from willow or heart medicines from foxglove digitalis, has come from ancient herbal and medical practices. The biodiversity COP’s Cali fund is an important statement and an important way for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and beauty companies—who profit from those discoveries and now have access to the data sequenced internationally —to make a contribution to protecting and preserving the future discoveries of medicine and the beauty and cosmetics industry—because their future innovations are literally on fire.
I am pleased that UK officials led the establishment of the Cali fund, as hon. Members know. We will officially launch it at London Climate Action Week in June. I hope we will be able to say more about that in due course. We are also hosting the conference of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services—IPBES, the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for nature—in England in February 2026, and we hope to make an official announcement about that. Next year will be a very big year for nature.
We know that forests are major carbon sinks: 662 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 15 years of human-made emissions, are stored in them. They cool our planet, providing up to 1° of cooling at mid latitudes. Hon. Members have made brilliant speeches, so they do not need to hear from me about the problems of deforestation, but time is running out. Deforestation is pushing critical biomes such as the Amazon towards potentially catastrophic tipping points, from which they will not recover. We are seeing annual Canadian wildfires, and even wildfires in our own country, with peat fires. All that is putting a massive strain on forest ecosystems.
I am just as concerned about the collapse of the Russian and Canadian boreal forests, to use another slightly jargonistic word; those northern forests are as important to our ecosystem services and our wildlife as the tropical mega-forests. It is essential that we protect, restore and manage forests in a cost-effective way to tackle climate change while supporting livelihoods. Often, the forest is seen as less economically valuable than other land uses such as cash crops, agriculture, infrastructure and urban development. I remember, on a visit to the eastern Congo in 2008, seeing the Batwa forest people living in a tea plantation. Their forests had been cut down as a cash crop, and they were living among those tea bushes because of the disastrous security situation obtaining in South Kivu at that time.
To halt deforestation, forested communities and countries need money to conserve forests. It must become more positive to conserve them than to clear them. That means three changes: an economic shift that values forests and rewards sustainable practices, governance reforms that support effective forest stewardship and tackle illegal activities, and market transformation here in this country to grow green enterprises, protect nature and enhance local livelihoods—not only livelihoods in forested countries, but changing the way that we as consumers purchase. We have heard about consumer demand leading to 35,000 hectares of forest loss overseas.
We import 45% of our food and 80% of our timber; we are the second largest importer in the world after China. That creates resilience problems for the future. Many sectors are underpinned by forest goods and services. A loss of forest will disrupt UK supply chains and businesses, pushing up prices for consumers and undermining our national resilience.
On the point my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West made about the financial industry, I had a meeting yesterday with Sacha Sadan of the Financial Conduct Authority—not specifically on deforestation, but about the sustainability branding of investment managers. I am pleased to say that the FCA, as the regulator, is taking strong and firm action to clean up greenwashing. If they are called sustainability funds, they have to comply with a series of rules and recommendations. That is why many funds have pivoted to “stewardship”, because they can no longer use “sustainability”. I say that for us all to understand what is happening in the financial context.
We are setting significant steps to protect and expand our domestic forests. Our key achievements include a legally binding target to increase tree cover to 16.5% of England’s land area by 2050, and planting more than 21,000 hectares of woodland across the UK between 2023 and 2024, including 5,530 hectares in England, the highest rate in a generation. When we see this year’s figures, they will be even higher. That is good news on the England tree-planting target. There has been some fallaway in Scotland and a slight change in the mix.
I take on the board the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones) to increase our conifer planting, because that is the productive forest we need. I am going to visit a factory constructing timber housing in Kenilworth and Southam on Friday; I am coming to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) for a three-day visit, because it is so difficult to get to, and to see the brilliant timber production that is going on there, as well as enjoy a midsummer night sky. I have much to do and look forward to.
Internationally, the previous Government persuaded partners to commit to halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. We want a just transition for forest-positive economies. That means securing development and the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and local communities, while tackling climate change and protecting nature. Through overseas development assistance, we support stronger forest governments.
I have been asked about ICF. We continue to support Brazil in its development. To begin with the TFFF, we are also supporting Brazil in its development. We cannot commit to an investment while work is still being done to develop the mechanism, but we will, of course, consider it in due course. Forests are a pillar of the UK-Brazil partnership, and we will support Brazilians ambitions for COP30, including through co-chairing the forest and climate leaders’ partnership, which I believe is covered by my colleague, the Minister for climate change.
On UK-China relations, we continue to work with key partners, including Indonesia and China, to support the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change global stocktake objective to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. On TFFF, we are providing technical assistance. We are involved in all the technical workstreams on environmental criteria, financial mechanisms and governance. From what I have seen, that seems to be similar to the Cali mechanism, which tries to crowd in funding from the private sector as well as public finance, because there is a limit to how much public finance can support this.
Barry Gardiner
If the Minister could clarify whether indigenous communities are represented on the board of the Cali fund, that would be really helpful.
Mary Creagh
I am afraid I have absolutely no idea; I will have to write to my hon. Friend. That is genuinely not my area.
We welcome the positive conclusions to the COP in Rome. The key outcome is the launch of the Cali fund, which will drive benefit sharing from the use of DSI—digital sequence information—on genetic resources, allowing companies using this information to direct funds towards indigenous people and local communities who safeguard biodiversity. At the biodiversity COP, for the first time we created the process by which IPLCs now have a seat at the table, which is very important.
My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd) mentioned the UK-Indonesia joint energy transition. As I have said, we will continue to work with key partners, including Indonesia and China, on the stocktake that supports the objective of halting and reversing forest loss by 2030. Future ICF is subject to business planning this year and to the spending review from next year. I am meeting the Minister for International Development this afternoon to discuss our approach on that; this is all work that is happening at the moment.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a particularly important region, but it has received less attention and less climate finance than the Amazon and south-east Asia. We are committed to working with others to secure the next phase of support, which will be announced at COP30, for the forests, people and biodiversity of the Congo basin countries. That will sit alongside the pledge for IPLCs’ land tenure. We know that communities are better able to protect ecosystems when their land rights are secure, and that areas managed by IPLCs are better protected than any other areas. The Foreign Secretary has already announced that the UK will lead on this IPLC land tenure pledge.
Sarah Champion
Will the Minister be covering the regulations on due diligence and when they will be published?
Mary Creagh
I am coming to that. Legislation complements the measures I have described. The UK timber regs aim to eliminate demand for illegally harvested timber, and the EU’s timber regulation continues to apply, unamended, in Northern Ireland. Both regs require operators that place timber on the market to implement due diligence and review their supply chains, and a recent review of the UK timber regulations demonstrated that they have led to a reduction of illegal timber in UK supply chains.
Over the past 12 years, our delivery partner, the Office for Product Safety and Standards—which, again, is part of the Department for Business and Trade, so not my area—has reviewed the due diligence systems of more than 600 businesses and issued 100 warning letters and 100 notices of remedial action. Recent notable enforcement by OPSS includes the prosecution of luxury yacht maker Sunseeker International, which received a fine of £360,000 plus prosecution costs in relation to illegal imports of timber from Myanmar and Africa.
At home, the Government must also abide by the rules we have made. The Government’s timber procurement policy requires all Government procurers and suppliers to prove the legality and sustainability of timber. We will only accept sustainable timber, and we have a wider approach to encouraging legal and sustainable forestry domestically and internationally. We are currently reviewing the timber procurement policy, with the aim of securing better recognition of British certification schemes such as Grown in Britain and FLEGT—forest law enforcement governance and trade—licensed timber.
We are at a critical moment for forests, and the international community must go further and faster to deliver our ambition. We need to tackle nature loss and enhance planetary stewardship. We are working to unlock more finance for nature, promote deforestation-free agriculture and reform global supply chains. Supporting indigenous rights and access to finance are also vital, and require targeted efforts across all tropical forest basins.
COP30 in Brazil, home to the world’s largest rainforest, will be a pivotal moment. We are working closely with Brazil and other partners to ensure that forests and nature take centre stage. We are partnering with Guyana as co-chairs of the forest and climate leaders’ partnership to build a valuable forum for driving wider ambition.
Agricultural expansion, particularly for a few key commodities, is the primary driver of illegal deforestation worldwide. As colleagues have said, the Environment Act made provision for the Government to bring forward legislation to exclude commodities. We recognise the urgency of the task to ensure that UK consumption of those commodities—
Barry Gardiner
Before the Minister runs down the clock, I just want to say that it is clear from Members across the House that we will not accept any further delay to the due diligence regulations, and that they must be placed not just—
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).