Corporate Social Responsibility

Global interconnectedness and the significance of climate change have increased the need for corporations to be transparent and socially, environmentally responsible:  

General Mills's global responsibility:
 ''we are committed to combating climate change 
by working towards sustainable emissions levels 
by 2050 and reducing GHG emissions by 28% by 2025'' 

 Nestlé has ''further strengthened'' its environmental commitments 

How transparent are corporations' motivations? And, more importantly, how sustainable can major corporations be? Can ''fair trade'', ''organic'', ''sustainable'' labels be deceptive? 

Nestlé promised to end deforestation in its supply chain after its responsibility in deforestation was exposed. I highly recommend taking a look at Greenpeace's  'How Palm Oil is Still Cooking the Climate' (the 'still' was added ten years after the original report in 2007).

Remember this? 

In 2010, Nestlé was Caught Red Handed (in its contribution to the deforestation for Palm Oil) and Greenpeace launched a massive campaign against KitKat (owned by Nestlé)

The bountiful rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia have helped address the world's thirst for palm oil, currently supplying about 85% of demands and they are not about to have a break. 

Just like corn and other cash crops, palm oil's value comes from its versatility. It is found in half of packaged products sold in supermarkets (and non-food products like biofuel). Significant pledges were made in light of COP21 to cut forest loss by half by 2020. By 2014, governments and corporations adopted 'no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation' (NDPE) policies: 

''Consumers have sent companies a clear signal that they do not want their purchasing habits to drive deforestation and companies are responding'' (Paul Polmann, Chief executive officer of Unilever, 2014). 

The reality is that the industry will continue flourishing (expected to produce 128 million tons by 2022) while forests continue being cleared (see, for example, A Deadly Trade Off). Executive chairman of Malaysia's IOI Group (one of the world's leading palm oil players) is very optimistic, expressing the company's vision to ''widen the geographical spread of palm oil products in the world and push the boundaries where palm oil can be applied and used''. If it produces four tonnes of crude palm oil (CPO) per hectare a year, IOI aims to double it. Indonesia's Minister for Economic Affairs is even more straightforward: “we will not let go of even one tonne of trade contract or potential demand palm has globally”. The country has made plans to convert around 18 million hectares of rainforests into plantations by 2020. 

Companies like Nestlé are shielded from the stains of deforestation with logos that certify their sustainable sourcing. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) does just that. 

What is 'sustainable'? Source

Making sure the sourcing of companies (and the legitimacy of logos and certificates) is truly sustainable requires tracing the activities back to the plantation levels. The Guardian published an article recently, titled Nestlé, Hersheys and Mars breaking promises over palm oil use. These food brands have reportedly been sourcing their palm oil from the vanishing Sumatran rainforest, where complex supply chains sometimes involve traders linked to illegal logging. 

Update: a new study has determined that the loss of primary forest habitats (from deforestation linked mainly to palm oil exploration) has led ''to an equivocal or higher threat of extinction'' of the Sumatran tiger. Tiger densities were reportedly 31.9% lower in disturbed areas, and, considering that 80% of the Sumatra's remaining hill, lowland and peat forest is already disturbed, forest conservation will determine the fate of Sumatran tigers and other species at the brink of extinction (Luskin et al., 2017).

Governments and corporations are responsible for large-scale land-cover changes and land-use dynamics. Traders should be held accountable for new plantation expansions across their supply chains. On the other hand, the regulators - governments - seem to be shying away from their commitments. 

What do you think?

Biodiversity loss

Studies suggest that local species richness enhances ecosystem resilience and productivity. However, the conversion of native biomes by agricultural vegetation is one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss (Norton et al., 2013). Biodiversity loss, in turn, becomes a major driver of ecosystem change. 

Calculating the value of ecosystem services (ESS) remains a challenge, but it is important as it drives conservation efforts. This map highlights the rapid loss of ESS due to habitat loss. 
Brazil experienced rapid vegetation conversion for agriculture, and while this trend has slowed (namely through protected areas and afforestation efforts) some ESS losses may be irreversible and fragmented habitats will never be the same. Source

Ecosystem stability is undermined by human activities. Non-marketable and essential ecosystem services include flood control, water purification, soil productivity, crop pollination, air quality and climate control, and the list goes on. According to the IUCN, tropical rainforests cover only 6% of Earth's land surface but are the most biologically diverse ecosystems, with the highest levels of endemic species. Kenton R Miller et al., in Deforestation and Species Loss: Responding to the Crisis (1991) calls the erosion of forest ecosystems due to deforestation an ''unprecedented raid on the planet's biological wealth''. He refers to tropical forests as ''living treasure houses-- a trove of uncounted habitats and species as diverse and individual as snowflakes, linked in the complex webs of interaction that define local ecosystems.''

Oooh edgy. (TheAtlantic)

Deforestation has an important impact on habitat fragmentation, which leads previously continuous habitats to become divided, increasing the vulnerability of species to extinction. The fragmentation of habitats is leading conservationists to study the ''edge effects'' on species; ''85% of forest animals are affected by the presence of an edge'' (Pfeifer et al., 2017). However, changes in species diversity vary at different spatial scales; whereas, globally, species diversity is decreasing, at smaller spatial scales it is often increasing (Sax and Gaines, 2003). It is important to consider changes in species diversity (both flora and fauna), and its impacts on ecosystem functioning, especially at local scales, where changes have the potential to influence ecosystem processes and services such as nutrient cycling and retention. Furthermore, local changes can ''scale up to affect global carbon budgets, global climate change, and the production of clean air and water'' (Sax and Gaines, 2003). For instance, many woody plants produce large fruits which depend on large animals for seed dispersal; the carbon storage capacity of forests is correlated with wood density, which, in turn, determine the size of seeds, therefore the ''loss of mutualistic partners can lead to tropical forests dominated by fast-growing, small-seeded plants with lower carbon stores'' (Johnson et al., 2017).

Land-System Change

Basic principles of good husbandry include: respecting land capacity; preserving genetic diversity, conserving soil (quality and quantity); managing rainwater; maintaining plant cover. Today, the aggregated impacts of agricultural transformations are replacing sustainable land use practices and contribute significantly to global environmental changes. Studying these changes requires questioning the sustainability of land-use dynamics, how they might affect changes in climate and global biogeochemistry and vice versa. 

The 9 Planetary Boundaries of Earth System Processes to guide the way humanity governs Earth. Check out all the Control variables for the 9 Earth System Processes

A planetary boundary is a concept created by Earth System scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Center to ''define a safe operating space for human societies to develop and thrive'' (Steffen et al., 2015). The control variables for land-system change include the irreversible and widespread conversion of native biomes, affecting carbon storage and resilience through losses in biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity. The short video below gives an idea of why it is important to identify 'limits' to human activities:

One of the main ways in which the agricultural sector contributes to climate change is deforestation. Methane and nitrous oxide have significantly higher warming potentials compared to carbon dioxide (in a 100-year time horizon) and are the main greenhouse gases from agricultural activities. However, carbon dioxide is the deforestation and forest degradation account for around 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

Source

Forests are globally important in regulating climate and locally important in sustaining communities and supporting biodiversity; however, industrial-scale human activities have altered the physical properties of land surfaces and its interactions with the biosphere and atmosphere. Biomass burning (for land clearing), fertilizers and pesticides, species transfer, plowing, irrigation, drainage, livestock pasturing, amongst others, have impacts that lead to secondary environmental impacts such as biodiversity loss, soil erosion, degradation, albedo alteration (Meyer and Turner, 1994). Environmental feedbacks to land-system change, in turn, require resilient human responses (B.L Turner, 1994).

 Land-cover change in temperate regions

The reflecting power of incoming solar radiation by surfaces (albedo) depends on land cover. Modelling studies estimated that increased surface albedo due to deforestation in temperate regions has most likely exerted a negative radiative forcing, in other words, produced a cooling effect. Bett's research (2000) shows that afforestation efforts to mitigate CO2 concentrations in temperate and boreal regions can actually ''offset the potential carbon sink'' by creating a low surface albedo that exerts a warming influence on climate. Thus it is important to consider the effects of land-cover change and land-use dynamics, ''both of which have strong human controls'' in mitigation targets.

Land-cover change in tropical regions

If the deforestation of the temperate and boreal forests has now broadly stabilized, it is the tropical forests that are being rapidly destroyed. More than 50% of rainforests have been severely degraded or converted mainly for agricultural expansion, accounting for nearly 90% of the total forest loss. The conversion of forests for cattle pasture is the second major contributor to tropical deforestation and is almost entirely concentrated in Latin America (Lovell S. Jarvis, 1986). 

Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, NSF