Financial Institutions Play Catch-Up in Deforestation Fight

Last year was a big one in the effort to vanquish deforestation. Several major corporations pledged to source soft commodities exclusively from producers that can prove they’re not linked to the destruction of forests, with an emphasis on the four goods most often blamed for driving the problem: beef,palm oil，纸和纸浆和大豆。（这种商品被称为柔软，因为它们种植而不是开采或提取。）

Between January and September 2014, 19 consumer goods companies — including French food giant Groupe Danone, U.S. cereal producer Kellogg Co. and French cosmetics conglomerate L’Oréal — adopted zero-deforestation policies on palm oil, according to CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project), a London-based nonprofit. At the United Nations Climate Summit in September, roughly two dozen national governments and three dozen companies endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests, which pledges to halve the rate of forest loss worldwide by 2020 and halt it by 2030.

但金融机构突出了缺乏对这个问题的真正运动。“金融部门一般大幅落后于解决森林砍伐的农业和消费者公司，”气候顾问董事总经理Glenn Hurowitz，一家以华盛顿州为基础的咨询亚慱体育app怎么下载公司，专注于气候变化，以及姐妹公司连锁反应研究的联合创始人，分析了金融机构的可持续性风险。“有一个真正的风险，金融业的不负责任的行为者将要融资可能破坏其他人所取得的进展的活动，”Wurowitz的警告，他也是弹药师的执行主任，气候顾问的联盟会员。

一位新倡议的木筏寻求帮助金融机构与从事森林砍伐的公司的结局关系。In January the Natural Capital Declaration, a joint initiative of the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative and the Global Canopy Program, launched its Soft Commodity Forest-Risk Assessment Tool, which lets banks and asset managers determine how well they’re managing risks that deforestation can pose to their businesses and portfolios, and where those policies fall in comparison with peers’. To develop its tool, the NCD partnered with Sustainalytics, an Amsterdam-based provider of sustainability research, to evaluate 30 financial institutions on their soft commodity and deforestation policies; it found that fewer than half had anything of the sort.

One bank that many in the space hail as a leader in combating deforestation isBNP Paribas。2010年底，基于巴黎的BNP推出了一项禁止融资任何参与联合国教科文组织世界遗产或高保价值森林的公司以及其他要求的政策。银行的社会负责任和融资政策的银行武库·瓦尔兰德表示，由于管理层认为“额外金融风险可以成为财务”，因此存在这些措施。

Climate Advisers’ Hurowitz cites stranded assets as one example of how deforestation could translate to financial loss. Traditional analysts and investors measure plantation companies’ value based on the size of their land banks, but those calculations don’t account for potential problems posed by the rise of deforestation-free policies, he says: “If a company cuts down a significant area of forest, it’s not going to be able to sell to the big buyers in the industry.”

另一个团体致力于聘请金融参与者是银行环境倡议，该计划是剑桥大学可持续发展领导研究所的项目，将12个主要银行的首席执行官聚集在内的Barclays，Deutsche Bank和Goldman Sachs Group，以便于讨论如何对可持续发展引导。去年4月北方发布了它的软化品紧凑型，签署签署者为帮助所有客户实现2020年的净森林砍伐。

但前进的道路本来就很复杂。Hurowitz thinks the goal of zero net deforestation is outdated and insufficient because replanting new forests doesn’t make up for the destruction of much older ones. The debate extends to questions as basic as what a forest is and what deforestation is, according to Iain Henderson, Geneva-based program officer for REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and sustainable land use at the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative. “It’s actually a relatively challenging job to turn around and say, ‘We’re going to strip deforestation out of our portfolio,’” Henderson notes. But the financial community needs to act, he adds. “The finance sector is a single entry point into multiple commodity supply chains in multiple geographies. Finance is not the silver bullet here, but it’s a relatively underexplored potential lever, and that’s quite exciting.”