“If we don’t solve this problem, it will solve us”

Global Canopy’s Executive Director, Niki Mardas, spoke to Tom Heap and Helen Czerski for BBC’s Rare Earth – Amazon Future, broadcast on 6 December 2024. Here are some of the highlights from a programme that discussed droughts and fires, deforestation and conservation, and driving change in the world’s largest rainforest.

By Niki Mardas

Executive Director

Record breaking droughts and fires

The Amazon rainforest is facing record breaking droughts and the worst fire season in two decades. And rampant deforestation is exacerbating the catastrophe.

“My first visit to the Amazon was in 2005 and that was what they then called a once in a century drought. Then there was a really big drought in 2010 and now there’s a massive drought this year and last. We’ve now had three ‘once in a century’ droughts in the last 25 years and the trajectory is not a good one.”

“We’re all part of a vast deforestation economy.”

Under Brazil’s President Lula, deforestation rates have fallen to their lowest levels in six years, but they remain high. In the year to August over 6,000 square kilometres of forest was destroyed.

“Ninety percent, plus, of global deforestation is linked to agricultural expansion for a handful of commodities. If you think of a Great British breakfast, you’ve got bacon and eggs – you may have had Amazonian soy fed to the pigs and the hen. Add in a glass of milk, and it might be the cow too.”

“Supply chains are extremely complex webs of financing, so one of the ways that we work at Global Canopy is to make the unseen seen, to make it clear how companies are linked to tropical deforestation and all the impacts that brings.”

“To eliminate deforestation from our much-loved fry up, we can of course change our habits, but the real problem is systemic. We need to see big companies clearing up their supply chains, and actual change on the ground.”

“We are all inadvertently financing this issue.”

For over a decade, Global Canopy’s Forest 500 has identified, ranked and monitored the 350 companies most exposed to deforestation and the top 150 financial institutions that fund them.

“[the Forest 500] companies have the potential to be the biggest levers for deforestation – if we focus on them taking action and actually changing things within their supply chains and their financing, we can see improvements to deforestation on the ground – which is the ultimate goal.”

“Our research shows US$6 trillion of money going each year into the 350 most exposed companies. For all the heroic efforts we’ve seen going back into the 80s [to save the forests] when you’ve got US$6 trillion funding a deforestation economy, that frankly is why we are not winning. We’ve got British banks funding some of the worst traders. We are all contributing through our pensions. 20% of UK pensions are highly exposed to deforestation – are driving the problem. So we are all inadvertently financing this issue.”

Government action

At COP26 in Glasgow over 140 nations signed the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests that promised to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. 2025 is just five years from that deadline. It’s also the year when COP30, the climate summit, will take place in Belem in Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon.

“There are some governments that are really doing the heavy lifting, but we need more governments to come on board.”

“Finance is the big issue. We need to scale up the money. The UK can lead on this to help meet our climate and nature targets and to act in partnership between consumer countries and forest countries, acting together to solve this problem that is in all our best interests.”

“There’s no solution to climate change without a solution to deforestation. And we have a global consensus. At COP26 in Glasgow, we had a statement by pretty much all world leaders including Brazil, Colombia and the UK, to say we need to end and reverse deforestation by 2030 – we have to stick to that. There has to be a growing collective consensus that if we don’t solve this problem, it will solve us.”

Listen to the full episode of Rare Earth – Amazon Future, on BBC sounds. The programme also features BBC South America correspondent, Ione Wells, who reports on this year’s droughts and fires in the Amazon; Angela Maldonado, who has worked for 25 years in the Amazon to combat the trade of wild monkeys for medical research, and Patricia Medici, who has spent 28 years protecting tapirs – South America’s largest land mammal – in the Brazilian Amazon’s southern arc of deforestation.

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