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Climate Focus, on behalf of the Meridian Institute, is working to identify major drivers or incentives that lead producers to change management and production practices to more sustainable operations. The project encompasses cattle and soy in Latin America.

This project builds on Climate Focus’ experience working on zero-deforestation supply chains, such as the Commodities and Forests Agenda 2020 and a background paper for the Prince of Wales International Sustainability Unit. Our previous work has provided us a strong understanding of corporate commitments and their barriers to success and our reviews of progress towards these efforts has been sobering. It is clear that overcoming the implementation challenges of commitments will require better support and partnership across the supply chain.

This team will systematically assess the ambition and implementation of corporate commitments in the cattle and soy supply chains and then consider how such commitments can help address barriers to producers’ adoption of sustainable practices. The latter will also be informed by a background analysis of deforestation driven by cattle and soy in Latin America that aims to confirm a number of implicit or explicit assumptions to identify the key barriers that hinder producers in adopting more efficient/sustainable land management practices. Desk research for this project will be complemented by in-country interviews with producer and downstream companies.

This project is supported on the ground in Brazil by Imaflora.