Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps he has taken to stop deforestation.

The UK continues to take a leading role working with global partners to halt and reverse deforestation. At COP26, the UK led the way on securing agreement from 128 world leaders to work together to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030 under the Glasgow Leader's Declaration on Forests and Land Use. Signatory countries account for almost 90% of the world’s forests, including first-time commitments from Brazil and China.

Unlocking finance is a crucial element in delivering shared global objectives for preventing deforestation. This is why Defra, along with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), has secured strong financial commitments at COP26 from partner states and philanthropic organisations in the fight against deforestation. This total includes a commitment of $12 billion from 12 countries for a new Global Forest Finance Pledge for the protection, restoration and sustainable management of forests; $7.2 billion of private sector funding was mobilised for protecting forests and nature and CEOs from more than 30 financial institutions representing $8.7 trillion of global assets committed to eliminate investment in activities linked to agricultural commodity-driven deforestation.

Defra supports several programmes which protect and restore diverse types of forests. This includes the 'Blue Forests' project in Madagascar and Indonesia, which has protected and restored over 180,000 hectares of mangrove forests and avoided 487 hectares of deforestation to date; and an investment of over £62 million to promote sustainable agriculture in Brazil, through low carbon technology, agroforestry and recovery of degraded lands with forests or pastures.

Defra and BEIS established the Forest, Agriculture and Commodity Trade Dialogue at COP26, where we are working with other producer and consumer governments to develop a joint approach to protect forests and other ecosystems while promoting sustainable development and trade.

The UK Government has doubled its international climate finance to £11.6 billion for the period from 2021-26, of which at least £3 billion will be spent on nature and nature-based solutions, including protecting and restoring forests.

Defra has introduced due diligence legislation through the Environment Act to tackle illegal deforestation in UK supply chains. This law will help us ensure there is no place on our supermarket shelves for commodities that have been grown on land that is illegally owned or used, and to support other countries to strengthen and enforce their forest protection measures. To maintain pace, we plan to launch a consultation to further inform the design of the law in late 2021. This is one part of a wider package of measures to improve the sustainability of our supply chains and will contribute to global efforts to protect forests and other ecosystems.