Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, if she will make an assessment of the implications for her Department's policies of recent trends in the level of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

BEIS is supporting a number of community, business and government-led initiatives, as part of the UK’s bilateral relationship with Brazil, that help increase the value of Brazil’s standing forest, promote the sustainability of agricultural production systems, and restore deforested land.

Implementation arrangements for these initiatives regularly assess how deforestation levels, and the underlying drivers, are changing relative to recent trends. BEIS officials work closely with teams in the UK’s Embassies in Brazil to routinely monitor progress, risks and opportunities.

Initiatives include:

• Supporting Brazilian state government leadership in Acre and Mato Grosso to reduce deforestation and grow sustainable farming and forestry industries (£43m of BEIS International Climate Finance, or ICF);
• Promoting entrepreneurship and investment in innovative sustainable forestry and farming businesses in Latin America (£19m of BEIS ICF);
• Helping UK companies to achieve their collective goal of securing a sustainable supply of soya to the UK from South America, through BEIS’s support to the UK Roundtable on Sustainable Soya; and
• Supporting the recently launched UK Global Resource Initiative Taskforce, comprising UK international businesses and experts, which will assess the UK’s wider footprint through commodity supply chains, and recommend clear actions for how businesses and government can lead a step change in the UK’s trade in sustainable commodities.