We extend a warm welcome to the following new members of our working group:

Shi An, China University of Mining and Technology
Ming Lei, China Agricultural University
Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, University of Osnabrück
Benjamin Neimark, Lancaster University
Ignacio Gasparri, Instituto de Ecología Regional (UNT-CONICET)
Edgar Espinoza-Cisneros, University of Costa Rica

Tuesday, 8 December
14:30-15:30 Central European Time

The GLP Telecoupling Working Group will hold its fourth webinar to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to governing telecoupling from the perspective of company policies to reduce commodity-driven forest loss. The webinar will include two presentations by Sam A. Levy (ETH Zürich) presenting work on the role of market share on the effectiveness of zero deforestation commitments in the Brazilian Amazon’s cattle sector, and Janina Grabs (ETH Zürich) discussing effective or performative governance in relation to implementation of zero deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector.

Please note: Attendance is limited to the first 100 participants who join the meeting the day of the event, regardless of registration order. We will send the webinar materials and a recording link to all registrants after the event, regardless of attendance.

We have a number of new interesting papers:

Janice Ser Huay Lee, Daniela Miteva, Kimberly Carlson, Robert Heilmayr, Omar Saif published a paper in Environmental Research Letters titled “Does oil palm certification create trade-offs between environment and development in Indonesia?”. The paper uses quasi-experimental methods to evaluate whether the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil certification system promoted village development and supported environmental quality in Indonesia from 2003-2014.

M Abdullah Shaikh, Michalis Hadjikakou and Brett Bryan from Deakin University, Australia, published a paper in Ecological Indicators on “National-level consumption-based and production-based utilisation of the land-system change planetary boundary: patterns and trends”. The paper downscales the land-system change planetary boundary and assesses its utilisation at a national-level for agri-food consumption and production. Consumption-based cropland footprints were assessed against national fair-share environmental limits, and production-based footprints were assessed against national biophysical environmental limits. The results can be used as a basis for countries to act as individual entities or together in groups, to develop policies that mitigate their global cropland impacts and minimise the risks associated with the exceedance of the land-system change planetary boundary.

As a first, Florence Pendrill, Martin Persson & Thomas Kastner would like to share a dataset made publicly available through the Zenodo data repository. The dataset contains estimates of tropical deforestation embodied in the production, exports, imports and consumption of agricultural and forestry commodities by country, year, and commodity, in the time period 2005-2017. The data is an update on the results presented in Pendrill et al. (2019a, b), using a land-balance model to attribute deforestation across 135 countries in the tropics to expansion of cropland, pastures and forest plantation and the commodities produced on this land, and tracing these commodities to consumption using a physical trade model. Find the dataset here.