Human Rights Watch Submission to the COP30 Presidency Consultation on a Roadmap to Halt and Reverse Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030

Dear Ambassador Corrêa do Lago,

Greetings from Human Rights Watch. We are an international nongovernmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights in more than 100 countries around the world. The investigations of our Environment and Human Rights division expose the connections between local environmental degradation, human rights harms, illegality, and trade. We engage with governments, multilateral institutions, and private companies to advocate for policies that protect rights and keep natural forests standing. 

We congratulate the COP30 Presidency on its initiative to draft a roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, and to launch this process in consultation with a diversity of stakeholders, maintaining momentum on this critical issue. 

We urge the COP30 Presidency to adopt the following overarching recommendations: 

• The Forest Roadmap should explicitly acknowledge agriculture, particularly livestock, as the main driver of forest conversion and propose solutions that reflect this assessment. 
• The Forest Roadmap should explicitly acknowledge the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in keeping forests standing and call on states parties to take steps to accelerate the formal recognition of their rights and protection of their territories. 
• The Forest Roadmap should call on states parties to adopt laws and regulations that require companies and financial institutions to identify, mitigate and remediate environmental and human rights risks in their value chains, and hold them accountable when they fail to do so.
• The Forest Roadmap should call on states parties to regulate carbon markets in line with international human rights law and the Carbon Justice Principles. 

Below, Human Rights Watch provides detailed responses to the consultation’s questions. We remain available to answer additional questions. 

Sincerely,

Luciana Téllez Chávez

Senior Researcher and Forestry Lead

Human Rights Watch

What are the most critical barriers — whether physical, economic, financial, institutional, technological or social — preventing the halting and reversing of deforestation and forest degradation?

1. Barriers to formally recognizing and protecting Indigenous peoples and local communities’ land tenure rights. 

• Globally, only 8 percent of customary land is formally recognized with documented ownership rights. The failure to formally recognize customary tenure rights in statutory law or in practice leaves important biodiverse territories vulnerable to encroachment and destruction.

• Where land tenure rights have been recognized, communities may still face barriers to fully enjoy their social, economic, and cultural rights and sustainably manage their territories over the long term. These barriers include: 
  • Lack of access to financing for developing sustainable livelihood activities; 
  • Obstacles to access markets such as poor connectivity and nonexistent transport infrastructure; 
  • Lack of access to training and equipment to manage forest fires; 
  • Poor communication with or insufficient intervention from law enforcement to suppress environmental crime;
  • Lack of enforcement of their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) on laws, policies and projects that impact their rights and livelihoods. 

2. Barriers to holding private entities accountable for their contribution to deforestation and other environmental and human rights harms.

• Agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation, the vast majority in tropical biomes. In Africa and Asia, more than 75 percent of the forest area lost was converted to cropland. In South America, nearly 75 percent of deforestation is due to livestock grazing. 
• Overall, the expansion of cattle pasture accounted for 42 percent of global deforestation driven by agriculture between 2001 and 2022, converting an area of forest the size of Spain and releasing half of all carbon emissions caused by commodity-driven deforestation globally. 
• Most cattle-driven deforestation happens at the expense of the Amazon rainforest, with cattle expansion in Brazil alone accounting for roughly a quarter of all agriculture-driven deforestation globally between 2001 and 2022.
• Insufficient traceability and transparency over domestic supply chains and international trade of agricultural commodities prevent law enforcement from verifying the legality of products and tackling crimes that take place at the early stages of production such as illegal forest clearances, fraudulent documents, illegal appropriation of public lands, labor rights violations and forced displacement of rural communities. This opacity also obstructs scrutiny by law enforcement on the links between legal and illicit economies, allowing perpetrators of environmental crimes to launder illegally obtained commodities through legally established businesses trading commodities domestically and internationally. 
• Absence of binding legislation requiring companies to conduct environmental and human rights due diligence over their entire value chains, and taking steps to identify, mitigate and remediate risks, create an accountability gap where private entities cannot be held responsible for their contribution to rights abuses or the destruction of public goods. 
• The absence of robust regulatory frameworks and their enforcement to ringfence the independence of regulators and elected representatives to ensure that their decisions are taken giving primacy to human rights and environmental concerns contributes to deregulation of environmental standards. 

3. Barriers to developing rights-respecting “green carbon” projects.

• The vast majority of tropical forested countries seeking to benefit from international forest carbon markets have not yet defined the rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendant peoples over carbon in their customary lands and territories. 

• When traditional communities’ carbon rights aren’t defined and aren’t enforceable, it enables carbon project developers to treat them as stakeholders instead of rightsholders, leading to:
  • Flawed processes to seek free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) defined by: failure to hold consultations in advance of critical project design choices; failure to consult legitimately constituted traditional authorities; failure to provide accessible information about the design, scope, nature and duration of a project; and failure to respect communities’ own FPIC protocols.
  • Opaque financial management defined by: inadequate or non-existent compensation for communities impacted by carbon projects on their customary lands; limited or no access to commercial information about projects developed on their customary lands; and so-called benefit-sharing agreements that inappropriately conceptualize communities as beneficiaries instead of rights holders. 

What potential levers, whether economic, financial, institutional, social or technological, exist for accelerating the implementation of the commitment to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation? (The information provided here also answers the consultation’s third question: (c) What country, regional or sector experiences, best practices, and lessons learned can be shared regarding forest conservation and restoration?)

1. Secure tenure rights in law and in practice. Globally mapped customary lands account for approximately 40 percent of the world’s total Intact Forest Landscape area, equivalent to an estimated 1.13 billion hectares. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land found that policies empowering Indigenous peoples and enhancing local and community collective action enable sustainable land management for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Acting on this evidence would require that states parties: 
   • Create new, or align existing legislation defining rights over customary land in line with key human rights instruments which, at a minimum, should include the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), and the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land (VGGT). 
   • Enable Indigenous communities to develop and enforce their own FPIC protocols and provide avenues for redress when these protocols aren’t observed by external actors, including avenues for holding accountable government agencies that fail to respect them.
   • Map and title collectively managed territories and maintain public registries of their boundaries and locations. 
   • Channel finance directly to traditional communities to support the development of sustainable livelihoods in customary lands, including through the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF). 
   • Adequately resource law enforcement authorities in charge of combatting environmental crime in customary lands, including through the TFFF.  

2. Regulate the conduct of businesses and financial institutions to align with environmental goals and human rights obligations. Under multiple international human rights treaties with broad adherence, the state has a positive obligation to prevent and punish third-party interference with the enjoyment of rights. This duty to protect includes preventing corporations from violating rights and taking steps to hold them accountable and provide reparation to victims when they do so. This duty can also be leveraged to address the responsibility of private entities and financial institutions for deforestation. Specific levers include:
   • Adopting binding domestic legislation that requires private entities and financial institutions to conduct due diligence on their value chains to identify and mitigate environmental and human rights risks, and, where relevant, take steps to remediate environmental and human rights harms to which they advertently or inadvertently contributed. 
   • Establish nationally enforceable, dissuasive penalties for private entities and financial institutions that fail to conduct mandatory due diligence or fail to proactively remediate harm to which they advertently or inadvertently contributed. 

3. Regulate carbon markets to align operations with human rights standards. Mapped customary territories hold an estimated 45 gigatons (Gt) of irrecoverable carbon. Forest biomes dominate this carbon storage capacity, accounting for 85 percent of the total. Developing carbon markets that are rights-respecting and operate with environmental integrity could be a way to channel finance directly to customary lands, but strong regulations must be put in place. Specific levers to accomplish this include:
   • Create new, or align existing legislation defining Indigenous peoples and local communities’ carbon rights with the Carbon Justice Principles.
   • Ensure that the management of protected areas, including the zoning of protected areas, is done in partnership with Indigenous peoples and local communities living in or near them, and respects their human rights, supports their livelihoods, and affirms their rights to land and culture.
   • Enable Indigenous communities to develop and enforce their own FPIC protocols and provide avenues for redress when these protocols are not observed, including avenues for holding accountable government agencies that fail to respect them.