Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what discussions the Government has had with international counterparts in the last 12 months on tackling the deforestation of the Cerrado savannah.

The UK has worked closely with Brazil's Ministries of Environment and Agriculture, Livestock and Supply to deliver a number of climate change mitigation and avoided deforestation programmes, including in the Cerrado savannah.

For example, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affiars has invested £10 million of international climate finance in the Reducing Deforestation in the Brazilian Cerrado Programme, which ran from 2012 to 2018 in partnership with the World Bank. The programme has successfully enabled 38,017 farmers to enrol on the Rural Environmental Registry in 43 municipalities in order to improve natural resource management and environmental compliance in the Cerrado. The programme also strengthened capacity to prevent and combat forest fires by developing a state of the art monitoring and warning system and supporting twelve municipalities and three Protected Areas to properly manage and combat forest fires.

Our current involvement in the Cerrado includes phase 2 of the Rural Sustentável programme, which will start implementation in July. The programme aims to support small and medium-sized farmers in adopting low-carbon agriculture in the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes in order to reduce deforestation. It is being delivered in partnership with Inter-American Development Bank and Brazil's agricultural research agency, with whom we have regular discussions.