The risks and realities across geographies and commodities – from soy in Brazil to palm oil in Southeast Asia – vary widely on the ground. As a result, businesses often implement their deforestation- and conversion-free (DCF) commitments inconsistently, and the credibility of their outcomes can suffer.
But piecemeal progress is to be expected when taking on such an ambitious task, and shouldn’t prevent companies from starting. By building on what's available today, businesses can strengthen their commitments and cement verified compliance over time.
Step 1: Understand your supply chain and exposure
Build a clear picture of the exposure and risk within your supply chain. This starts with overlaying crop production areas with deforestation and conversion data to identify hotspots at the sub-country level. The resulting picture will guide how granular traceability can be in each area – whether national, subnational, or farm-level – and where to focus supplier engagement, capacity building, and mitigation efforts.
Step 2: Establish clear definitions and scope
Committing to an established framework will ensure the resulting outcomes are comparable and reliable.
It’s also crucial to confirm a scope that covers your whole supply chain. If you target only high-priority countries or direct suppliers, or narrow your focus to illegal conversion rather than all deforestation and conversion, deforestation can persist in the overlooked gaps.
In the same vein, setting a clear cut-off date – the point from which land must be free of deforestation and conversion – is key to establishing a baseline against which compliance can be measured.
Step 3: Match traceability and due diligence to risk
While it provides the strongest assurance – and should be pursued in the highest-risk regions – farm-level traceability isn't always necessary to confirm DCF status. It should be viewed as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. Two workable alternatives exist:
- Remote sensing
These tools can confirm your crop originates from a jurisdiction with no (or negligible) deforestation and conversion within your cut-off date by assessing land-use change from satellite data.
- Controlled mass balance
All chain of custody decisions should be aligned with your operational reality. Rather than choosing the strictest model on paper – and struggling to meet the criteria – prioritise a model that works effectively and can continually improve.
That might mean starting with regional, state, or national-level mass balance, moving to site-level mass balance, and then to controlled mass balance.
Step 4: Put credible verification and monitoring in place
Independent verification is essential for credibility. Third-party verification is the gold standard.
Keep in mind that ongoing monitoring matters as much as initial verification, as it will allow you to quickly pinpoint and remediate land-use change in an area that was previously confirmed as DCF. Without consistent monitoring, deforestation can continue to occur out of sight and your commitments may no longer reflect reality.
Step 5: Bring suppliers into the process
Supplier awareness and willingness to collaborate will typically vary significantly – by crop and region, but also even within the same crop and country. Perhaps surprisingly, suppliers in high-risk areas may be more collaborative as they are already used to stakeholder scrutiny, while suppliers in lower-risk regions may be more defensive and question why data is needed.
In these cases, it’s especially important to build trust and articulate the benefit of these requests. Engaging suppliers and providing them with incentives to improve transparency and adopt more responsible practices is critical to closing the traceability gaps that hold DCF implementation back.
Step 6: Improve, don’t wait
Factors beyond the control of any one business mean that data availability and quality are highly inconsistent across commodities and geographies.
But you can't wait for perfect data to drive progress on DCF goals. Success comes from acting now and moving steadily towards best practice.
The hardest actions to get off the ground are often the most powerful because they require cooperation beyond the boundaries of any single supply chain. These will include embarking on efforts to collaborate at the landscape and sector level; aligning with credible frameworks such as the Accountability Framework Initiative; and disclosing progress through public reporting to set norms across the sector.
Conclusion
Your business can’t wait for perfect conditions to operationalise DCF commitments. Instead, put credible approaches in place where you can, and strengthen them over time as datasets and definitions mature.
