How GFW Pro supports EUDR compliance
A Spanish version of this article is available.
As the compliance deadline for the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) approaches, companies have been preparing to implement or strengthen systems to assess and mitigate deforestation risks in their supply chains. Businesses are currently making every effort to ensure they can comply with due diligence rules, but with a proliferation of monitoring data and tools, how do they know which will best suit their needs?
The short answer? It depends. There will be no one-size-fits-all solution and no single data set that will serve all EUDR compliance needs. To get accurate and reliable information, companies will need to harness a variety of data sources and tools, and evaluate tradeoffs between accuracy, precision and cost-effectiveness for their specific use cases. GFW Pro, the enterprise version of World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch (GFW), provides a robust starting point that will generally be sufficient for meeting the EUDR’s due diligence requirements, which consist of three main steps: 1) information gathering, 2) risk assessment, and 3) risk mitigation.
A useful starting point for the EUDR
GFW Pro makes deforestation monitoring accessible, reliable and affordable at a global scale. Despite the challenges of linking EUDR requirements to what can be monitored with satellite data, GFW’s open data has long been of value for monitoring zero-deforestation commitments and voluntary reporting, with peer-reviewed methodologies and transparently reported limitations. Learn more here about how GFW data can support EUDR monitoring needs, enabling users to set a forest baseline using EUDR-aligned definitions, track deforestation and map commodities; and learn more here about how GFW data can help monitor for forest degradation under the EUDR.
Step 1: Information gathering
To fulfill the first step of the EUDR due diligence process, companies will need to collect product information and geolocation data for where commodities are produced.
GFW Pro offers a secure environment for users to manually upload locations (points or polygons) to create a list or portfolio. With the polygon tool, users can also create individual polygon geometries for areas of interest by entering location coordinates, enabling them to map farms with little or no GIS experience. For organizations that have amassed rich databases of sourcing locations, GFW Pro’s direct integration via application programming interface (API) offers a programmatic option to exchange lists containing as many as 150,000 locations each.
Step 2: Risk assessment
The EUDR then requires that companies conduct a risk assessment and prove that products are not linked to deforestation. GFW Pro’s recently introduced deforestation report diagnostic can support due diligence processes as the underlying data and analyses allow organizations to verify whether a commodity has been produced, grown or raised on land that was deforested or degraded after the cut-off date of December 31, 2020.
Integrated into the analysis is the Natural Forest Map, which is a part of the Natural Lands Map underpinning land use targets established by the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN). The natural forest class used in the map is a close approximation of the EUDR’s definition of forest, and excludes planted forests and tree crops or agricultural plantations.
This can be used in tandem with one of GFW Pro’s key data sets for deforestation monitoring: the tree cover loss data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD lab, provided annually at 30-meter resolution, which is widely used to assess change in forest cover. Tree cover loss within natural forest areas may not always be followed by agricultural use, which is the definition of deforestation used by the EUDR, but detecting loss is an important first step for identifying potential deforestation before resorting to more expensive commercial satellite imagery.
Near-real-time (NRT) alerts, embedded in the GFW Pro dashboard, allow companies to identify forest disturbances quickly with high confidence across the tropics and prioritize sourcing locations for further investigation. Integrated deforestation alerts bring together data derived from multiple sensors to monitor changes since the last annual tree cover loss report. This data includes GLAD-L alerts derived from 30-m Landsat imagery in combination with 10-m GLAD-S2 alerts derived from Sentinel-2 and RADD alerts derived from cloud penetrating radar data from Sentinel-1. Combining data from multiple sources has several benefits, including increased confidence that change has occurred and increased frequency in change detection.
Visual verification of flagged deforestation risks is crucial in this step, so the high-resolution Planet imagery available on GFW Pro is a useful resource in helping users understand whether tree cover loss from after 2020 is deforestation according to the EUDR, or to validate near-real-time alerts. Planet provides 5-m resolution mosaics of tropical forests, updated on a monthly basis, which can be used for identifying potential causes of forest loss and verifying that deforestation has occurred.
Integrated deforestation alerts detecting change on a cocoa-producing landscape in Cote d’Ivoire — alerts overlaid with the SBTN Natural Lands Map can help distinguish forest disruptions in natural forests from those that are part of normal agroforestry activity
Integrated deforestation alerts detecting change in a soy landscape in Bolivia
The EUDR defines deforestation as “the conversion of forest to agricultural use, whether human-induced or not.” Crop maps on GFW Pro can help users identify which forest losses are linked to agricultural conversion in the absence of detailed sourcing information, and avoid false positives in deforestation detection. The Cocoa Deforestation Risk Assessment (DRA) is a map layer that identifies the risk of future deforestation events linked to cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, so it can be used to prioritize interventions in cocoa supply chains, while the Soy Planted Area layer provides a view of the annual planted area of soybean cultivation across South America.
In addition, the EUDR requires products to be produced in accordance with relevant laws in the country of production. GFW Pro supports this with contextual data layers such as the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), which displays areas that are legally protected according to various designations like national parks, state reserves and wildlife reserves.
Regional and country-specific data for a growing number of countries is also available on GFW Pro, making local risk assessment even more robust and helping organizations ensure compliance with country-specific requirements. For example, GFW Pro provides analysis of Argentina’s forest data to help companies comply with the National Forest Law, which restricts where tree clearing is allowed in the country. Data for additional countries and regions will be added to the platform over time.
Argentina’s Territorial Planning of Native Forests, which categorizes forests according to their conservation value. Lands that are in Category I (red) have a very high conservation value and must not be transformed.
Together, these tools can help organizations establish robust due diligence practices, analyze and document findings, prioritize and act on risks and meet compliance reporting requirements.
Step 3: Risk Mitigation
Finally, if risks are identified in step 2, the EUDR requires companies to explore risk mitigation measures, which may include collecting additional data and conducting further analysis on GFW Pro, sharing risk factors with field staff for ground truthing and supplier engagement in sourcing areas, or carrying out independent surveys and audits.
GFW Pro provides trusted tools that are well placed to support EUDR compliance
GFW Pro has long supported zero-deforestation commitment tracking and voluntary disclosure through platforms such as CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) with methods and metrics in line with global best practices and standards, some of which are already largely aligned with EUDR requirements.
WRI contributed to the Accountability Framework initiative’s Common Methodology for corporate reporting and assessment, and GFW Pro has developed indicators aligned with the methodology such as the negligible risk metric, which identifies deforestation risk at a sub-national level. The Common Methodology has been used to standardize the methodologies of CDP, reporting standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), assessment initiatives such as Forest 500 and the policies and KPIs of industry associations like the Consumer Goods Forum.
Using a platform that incorporates an aligned approach streamlines workflows and simplifies reporting requirements for companies, whether for mandatory or voluntary purposes. For example, reporting through CDP supports the process of conducting due diligence for the EUDR and other emerging legislation.
BASF, Colgate-Palmolive, Estee Lauder Companies, Musim Mas, PepsiCo and Unilever are some of the companies that use GFW Pro for deforestation monitoring and risk assessment across their supply chains to track progress against their corporate commitments, which is then disclosed to their stakeholders through CDP reporting. Through GFW Pro, Olam Food Ingredients (ofi) has been able to review the deforestation and land use change results for more than 800,000 farms across 40 countries for coffee, cocoa, spices, nuts and dairy in order to ensure that its products on the market are deforestation-free.
An essential part of the EUDR toolbox
Ultimately, GFW Pro is a good first step in the complex path to EUDR compliance as it is already widely used across the private and nonprofit sectors. Publicly available data, with peer-reviewed methodologies that stand up to independent scrutiny, has immense value in the regulatory landscape as it lays a strong foundation for deforestation risk assessment. In most cases, this data will support compliance reporting needs outright, but it can also identify areas requiring additional investment in the form of very high-resolution satellite imagery or further field investigation. Given its credibility, reliability and accessibility, GFW Pro should be an essential component of any organization’s EUDR toolbox.
In line with our nonprofit mission, GFW Pro is free to use up to a substantial annual allowance that will meet the internal needs of most organizations. To get started, please request an account at Global Forest Watch Pro.