Meet your Deforestation and Conversion-Free commitments with confidence
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Verify® for Deforestation and Conversion-Free (DCF) commitments brings you real-time, independently assured results, aligned with the latest industry standards and rooted in rigorous legality checks. Empower your supply chain with trust, transparency, and accountability.
Ready to deliver on your DCF commitments?
When making DCF commitments, your company will have to ensure that no commodities are sourced from land that has been deforested or converted from natural ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, or peatlands, after a set cut-off date.
Unlike “deforestation-free,” which focuses only on forests, DCF also protects other critical habitats by preventing the transformation of any natural ecosystem into non-natural land uses.
Applying DCF to your supply chain requires verifying that land meets these criteria and monitoring compliance across all stages, from direct suppliers to indirect actors, helping safeguard biodiversity and essential ecosystem services.
Meeting your DCF commitments in 4 steps
Start by defining the cut-off date after which sourcing from deforested or converted land is not permitted. This baseline should be grounded in credible land-use change data and will be your reference point for compliance. It’s essential to clearly communicate this date internally and to all suppliers, as market access with certain buyers depends on proof of compliance.
Decide the geographic scope and resolution of your monitoring. This can range from broad jurisdictional boundaries to supply-shed models, buffer zones, or precise farm-plot mapping. The finer your unit of analysis, the more robust your verification, and the easier it is to demonstrate compliance to customers and industry coalitions.
For all the above options, we assume that you have a list of the sourcing facilities and their locations. Meridia can support with the identification of facilities if necessary. Our experts can also provide guidance on defining your company’s DCF methodology and parameters.
Identify potential deforestation or conversion risks within your supply chain—frequency matters. Ongoing assessments help to catch issues early and avoid non-compliance that could jeopardise market relationships.
Integrate DCF expectations into contracts, provide training and guidance to suppliers, and set up a monitoring and grievance system. This builds shared responsibility across direct and indirect suppliers, ensuring they understand that a breach in DCF standards could result in exclusion from key markets.
Real-time data verification & DCF risk insights
Verify helps you identify deforestation or conversion risks within your supply chain, across forests and non-forest ecosystems like savannahs, peatlands, and wetlands.
We currently support more than 55 of the most widely traded agricultural commodities across over 40 origins.
By transforming complex data into clear, actionable dashboards, Verify helps you prioritise high-risk suppliers and implement targeted remediation plans swiftly.
Identify deforestation and ecosystem conversion risks across your supply chain
Our risk assessments cover forests and critical non-forest ecosystems with audit-ready precision.
You can choose to run a risk assessment focused solely on deforestation risks or include conversion risks as well.
We combine public deforestation maps with commercial layers for comprehensive and verifiable risk identification.
Beyond deforestation and conversion-free, we verify compliance with relevant local laws
Verify’s legality testing identifies compliance risks in your supply chain by analysing production laws and local regulations specific to the country of origin.
It includes land use rules, embargoes on illegal deforestation and conversion, Indigenous rights, environmental protection, and human rights, following legal requirements and industry standards such as AFi.
Prioritise high-risk suppliers to engage with targeted remediation plans
Clear dashboards provide actionable recommendations with provided context per identified risks and high-risk suppliers.
This ensures you can address risks promptly and maintain supply chain integrity.
Easy to use, also for non-GIS experts, and saves the team valuable time
Verify is designed for ease of use, so anyone can get started quickly, making powerful geospatial tools accessible to your entire team.
Save time with automatic, real-time verification and risk assessments, eliminating the need for manual work.
Feature
Meridia Verify
Other companies
Deforestation + conversion
Yes
Often deforestation only
Legal compliance
Embargoes, protected areas, and forced labour
Limited/none
Data granularity and specificity
Country-specific, official sources
Often global, generic or outdated
Cutoff flexibility
Supports cut-off year selection
Usually fixed
How we ensure the most rigorous DCF risk assessments
Using a stringent methodology and audited process, satellite imagery and country-level legality datasets, Verify delivers the most accurate DCF risk assessments.
Our methodology is transparent, well-documented and versioned, so the results are repeatable and comparable.
Whether you already have a DCF baseline and progress reporting and need it independently verified, or just getting started and need us to set a baseline and monitor against it, we can support you.
Alignment with the latest industry standards
Our methodology is built in alignment with AFi’s latest guidance, observing minimum criteria and dataset recommendations from local organisations for each country.
Verify is audited through ISAE 3000.
Comprehensive, country‑specific criteria coverage
We don't just measure deforestation and conversion, but include legality, protected areas, forced labour embargoes, and other locally relevant datasets that the industry expects in each sourcing country.
This country‑tailored approach ensures all relevant checks are performed according to official, peer‑reviewed, and widely accepted data sources.
Ensure true plot boundaries and reliable supplier attributes
Clear dashboards provide actionable recoIn the absence of farm plot–level data, Verify DCF can conduct area-level verification, such as at the jurisdiction (municipality or district) or buffer area scale.
To enhance accuracy and track DCF progress, we also have unique capabilities to generate precise supply sheds for your supply chain.
All datasets, whether farm-level, buffer, or supply shed, are rigorously tested for accuracy, consistency, and plausibility
Built on a decade of field experience
Over 10 years of mapping farmers in various commodities and origins. We know firsthand how to achieve results on the ground with farmers, communities and in landscapes.
Our solutions are field-tested and supported by a decade of experience working with geospatial data on sustainability in supply chains.
What if you do not have farm plot data? We got you covered!
Our accurate supply sheds offer much greater realism and accuracy, significantly minimising false positives.
Unlike buffer zones (red circles), which oversimplify reality, ignore local conditions, and often capture unrelated deforestation, our modelled supply shed (vanilla and green areas) provides more reliable insights.
It prevents double-counting, offers transparent identifiers, and clearly discloses uncertainties, ensuring defensible and accurate supply chain analysis.
See Verify® for DCF in action
Key questions and answers about DCF commitments
A DCF commitment means your company pledges not to source any commodities from land that has been deforested or converted from natural ecosystems, such as forests, savannahs, wetlands, or peatlands, after a set cut-off date. This approach helps protect biodiversity and essential ecosystem services across all natural landscapes, not only forests.
Deforestation refers only to clearing forests for other land uses, while conversion is broader and includes the transformation of any natural ecosystem, such as grasslands or wetlands, into non-natural land uses. By adopting DCF rather than just deforestation-free, you ensure the protection of critical habitats that lie outside traditional forests.
You must confirm that the land meets the commitment (i.e., it hasn’t been deforested or converted after the cut-off date) and actively monitor compliance with these standards, not just for direct suppliers but across the entire chain, including indirect actors.
You put DCF commitments into operation by establishing a baseline (including a cut-off date) for land-use change, defining your unit of analysis (jurisdictional, buffer area, supply shed modelling or farm plot mapping), undertaking regular risk assessments using satellite and land-use data, and maintaining ongoing supplier engagement through contracts, training, and monitoring systems.
Companies can have several reasons for adopting DCF commitments. For example, securing or maintaining market access, reducing supply chain risks, protecting brand integrity, and meeting growing investor demands. Additionally, companies might use DCF commitments to future-proof operations against new regulations and contribute to mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.
No. DCF commitments are voluntary, whereas EUDR compliance is legally required for EU market access. However, a strong DCF policy can help you go beyond EUDR’s requirements and meet a wider set of expectations.
Aspect
DCF commitments
EUDR compliance
Legal status
Voluntary
Legally required in the EU
Ecosystem scope
Forests + other ecosystems
Forests only
Geographic scope
Global sourcing
EU market access
Cut-off date
Flexible (e.g. 2015, 2020, 2025)
Fixed: 31 December 2020
Objectives
ESG, biodiversity, carbon (emission reduction), reputation
Legal market access, enforcement
Yes, if you accurately map supply origins, carry out rigorous risk assessments, and maintain clear documentation, a DCF system simplifies EUDR due diligence. You must ensure alignment with EUDR’s specific requirements, such as its fixed cut-off date and legal proof of origin.
A DCF commitment means your company pledges not to source any commodities from land that has been deforested or converted from natural ecosystems, such as forests, savannahs, wetlands, or peatlands, after a set cut-off date. This approach helps protect biodiversity and essential ecosystem services across all natural landscapes, not only forests.
Yes. With Verify, you can choose to run a risk assessment focused solely on deforestation risks. The tool is fully equipped to deliver accurate and reliable insights, also if you are not including conversion in your assessment.
The most common challenges are:
- Aligning multiple, sometimes conflicting cut-off dates;
- Gaining traceability to the plot level, especially with smallholders and indirect suppliers;
- Defining and mapping non-forest ecosystems;
- Managing inconsistent data quality;
- Underestimating the resources needed for supplier engagement and continuous monitoring.
Verify delivers scalable, automated farm-level verification and risk assessment, pooling satellite imagery, historical data, and expert analysis to identify deforestation and conversion risks—even across complex supply chains. Meridia’s experts can provide guidance on defining your company’s DCF methodology and parameters.
Complementary services like polygon mapping, field data collection, and supplier training round out your compliance toolkit.
Verify is your comprehensive solution for scalable, automated farm-level verification and risk assessment. Using satellite imagery, expert geospatial analysis, and trusted data sources, Verify identifies deforestation and conversion risks, covering both forest and non-forest ecosystems, even in complex supply chains with indirect suppliers and smallholders.
It delivers audit-ready, actionable insights via intuitive dashboards, helping you prioritise remediation and maintain transparent compliance. Backed by expert validation and continuous monitoring, Verify empowers confident, reliable DCF compliance and supply chain resilience.