GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Greening Global Trade, with Duncan Brack
In this episode we're talking to Duncan Brack, a leading policy analyst who transitioned from health issues to global sustainability and the world of forest governance and trade regulation. With Duncan we learn how international trade impacts environmental sustainability, especially when it amplifies unsustainable practices. We look at the intricacies of trade systems and energy policies as we explore incoming solutions like the EU Deforestation Regulation.
Our discussion doesn't stop there; we consider the role of biomass in achieving net-zero emissions, looking at its environmental viability and the pressures it places on global forests.
We also touch on politics with Duncan, including the European Parliament's right-wing majority and its effects on environmental legislation. We reflect on the UK's evolving relationship with the EU and the potential for rekindling stronger ties.
And of course - communication emerges as a vital tool in addressing divisive political issues and securing a sustainable future.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone, you are listening to Good Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Duncan Bragg, a hugely experienced policy analyst and advisor who has worked across UK government, eu institutions and the UN and its agencies. Duncan was an associate fellow at the Chetnam House think tank and an associate of Green Alliance.
Speaker 3:And Duncan's track record means we've got way too much to talk about today, but it includes deforestation, agriculture and climate change, international forests, timber trade, bioenergy and, most recently, duncan's been working with the Tropical Forest Alliance, climate Earth and the COCO. Duncan's been working with the Tropical Forest Alliance, client Earth and the Cocoa Coalition. So, duncan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Dan there and myself. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. So first of all, duncan, tell us how it all started. So how did you begin your environmental journey and where has that journey taken you?
Speaker 4:Well, basically it was a chain of accidents. So right at the beginning of my career I thought I was destined for a career in health policy. I'd worked in, I was active in the Liberal Party in British politics, I'd worked for the party's health spokesperson in the House of Commons. I worked for the Royal College of Nursing, the Nurses' Trade Union here in the UK, but then the Liberal Democrats, the one successor to the Liberal Party, was formed in 1988. And there was a big changeover of staff and I got to be appointed as the party's first policy director, so in charge of the policymaking program, election manifestos and so on. And we're still a relatively small party and a very small staff complement. So what I did was give support to working groups of experts from within the party, and the party was full of people who understood all these issues. And environment, of course, was just emerging as a sort of major issue at the time. But for some reason all the experts within the Liberal Democrats on environmental policy were great. They really knew what they were talking about, but they couldn't write decent English. So I had to get involved in their working group and help them write the policy papers and I found, to my pleasure that I really found the topics really interesting. This was during the period the run-up to the Earth Summit and just following the Earth Summit environment was really becoming a major issue in environmental relations. So when I stopped working for the party, when I thought I'd been there long enough as a staff member, I wasn't only applying for environmental jobs but I was pleased to get one working on the interrelationship between trade, international trade rules and environmental rules at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank in London. The WTO had just come into being and there was a big debate, a live debate then, about how WTO disciplines would affect environmental rules. And actually in reality the debate didn't go anywhere and in fact people are still talking about exactly the same issues we talked about in the late 90s without resolving really. But that's where I started. Then I got the background in understanding international trade patterns, and international trade rules has been useful in lots of things I've done and my current work in particular on forest risk, commodity supply chains and international trade and how you might regulate those. And there's still lots of misunderstanding of how WTO rules affect those kind of issues. But then I didn't really know anything about forest to start with. But because I'd done some work on international trade and I'd done a bit of work on illegal trade as well, for example in wildlife or chemicals.
Speaker 4:When the UK agreed to be the focal point for work on illegal logging after the 1998 G8 summit and the G8 declaration on forests had a number of focal areas, the UK took the lead on illegal logging and the Department for International Development, which again was a new department, kind of expanding its activities, um just informed. The year before. Um came to us and said we know you haven't done any work on forests. We don't want to go to the usual forest suspects but we like the work you've done on trade and environment. We've done a separate piece of work on global environment of institutions. We'd like you to do a kind of scoping document about everything that could be done, everything that governments could do to start to address the problem of illegal logging and the trade in illegal timber.
Speaker 4:So we did a very kind of high-level document things that could be done in producer countries to try and improve forest governance and law enforcement, things that consumer countries could do to avoid importing illegally logged timber and things you could do with trade rules in between. And that sparked off. It led eventually to a really big program of activity at Chatham House. We issued lots of reports, we hosted the website, we hosted meetings every six months, lots of things were happening on the forest, illegal logging and forest governance space at the time and that led eventually or helped to lead eventually to the EU's Forest Law Enforcement, governance and Trade Action Plan the FLEGT Action Plan, which was agreed in 2003. And that sparked a whole range of activities about bilateral agreements and trade controls and the EU timber regulation and so on, and you can see where that debate has gone on now more widely on other commodity supply chains. Sorry, that was a very long answer.
Speaker 3:No, it was brilliant. Actually, I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:And I'm amazed how you intricately told us your own story and the big picture together. So it seems that your work also is a very big part of your identity and your passion, so I'm really excited about it and I'm happy that you brought up your current work, because my question will be about that. It includes looking at EU regulations around global deforestation. Part of the Green Deal, and how much do you think of a game changer, is EUDR and why has it been delayed?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think the EUDR is enormously important. So I'm sure I don't know if your listeners will know, but the EUDR deforestation regulation agreed after about 18-month debate um the middle of last year, 2023. It's currently in the transition period which was due to end at the end of this year. It's just been extended, or just about to be extended, by another year. So companies are putting in place the um processes they need.
Speaker 4:The aim is to make sure that any of a list of defined forest risk commodities seven main ones plus lots of derived products, so there's cocoa and chocolate, there's cattle products and leather, etc. Anything, any of those products placed on the EU market has been produced without deforestation after the end of 2020, and also legally, according to the laws of the producing country. And for some commodities, I think the supply chains were in a bit of a better shape. Perhaps palm oil, cocoa, timber, I think because of the EU timber regulation, which is a kind of earlier model, not quite the same, but it helped lay the foundations. Those commodity sectors are relatively familiar with supply chain scrutiny and control. Other ones cattle products, rubber, soya much, much less so and, I think, having a real struggle. So the deforestation regulation puts in place a process of due diligence for companies. They have to go through a process of collecting information about the products, assessing the risk of non-compliance with the two basic criteria zero deforestation and legality and then mitigating the risk if it's found to be non-negligible. Also, they have to collect information about the products and file a due diligence statement when they put the products on the EU market, and that includes some quite detailed information such as the geolocation points of the plot of land where the commodity was produced. So that's quite a lot of information. In some cases, companies were collecting that information already. Certification schemes like Fairtrade, rainforest Alliance, fsc, rspo and so on. Some of them helped them collect that information. Many of the schemes just been doing some work on this. Actually, many of the schemes have adapted themselves or added EUDR modules to make sure they do help to comply more fully with the requirements of the regulation.
Speaker 4:But it stimulates a huge range of activity in mapping supply chains, establishing traceability mechanisms back to the origin. Sometimes it's by companies, sometimes it's by countries like West Africa for cocoa and Brazil for several products. You've got national traceability. Sometimes it's by companies. Sometimes it's by countries like west africa for coco in brazil for several products. Um, you've got national traceability systems being put in place. Companies are wanting to know how they can uh comply with their due diligence requirements. I felt the internet. I've worked with the international trade center, the un and wto. Uh established initiative to work with businesses, particularly exporters, to help them just provide basic handbooks and explanations of how the EUDR works.
Speaker 4:Some of the requirements are really quite complex. Actually, one of the problems was the regulation is fairly detailed, actually more so than the timber regulation, which is much clearer about what companies have to do. But, as you can imagine, every supply chain is just a bit different. Every commodity is a bit different. It led to lots of questions about exactly what particular parts of the regulation meant and how they could be applied and what different companies at different parts of the supply chain had to do. So the European Commission has been publishing a series of FAQ, frequently asked questions, clarifications and also quite a detailed set of guidelines. They were really really slow to come up with the latest set. They had drafts available in May, I think this year, but they weren't finally published until October and you could just see the kind of uprising of trade associations, companies saying, look, we have to. We're just not going to be ready for this by the end of the year. We haven't put the necessary systems in place. You haven't given us the clarifications that we need to do that. Your information system, the electronic information system through which they file the due diligence statements, isn't ready. Actually, that opened for people to put information in just two days ago, so it's just come into creation and eventually I think there was quite a lot of pressure for a delay, not just from within the EU also, but from producer countries outside the EU who export products to the EU.
Speaker 4:The EU is still a major importer of all of these products timber, cocoa, coffee, soya, palm oil, rubber I've forgotten one cattle products.
Speaker 4:So just the commission in the end. Not everyone wanted to go along with this NGOs, some of the companies who'd invested in the systems wanted to go ahead on schedule, but there was quite a lot of pressure for a delay. So finally they've agreed a they're almost about to agree a 12-month delay, so companies will have another 12 months until the end of next year to put the systems in place. But I think the whole thing is actually similar to what we saw when the FLEGT action plan was published back in 2003, dealing with forest governance and illegal logging. It stimulated a huge range of activity kind of studies of the drivers of the problems, possible options to deal with them, investment in technical solutions, satellite options to deal with them, investment in technical solutions, satellite monitoring of deforestation, better collection of information on supply chains, and you're seeing this similar kind of range of activity stimulated by the EUDR. So yeah, I mean it's going to take a while to get it fully in place, but I think it's been transformational actually in this debate.
Speaker 3:I'm fascinated, Duncan, because you and I were at a conference a couple of weeks ago on the impact of all this in the world of soy, and even just hearing all the technical solutions and data and monitoring and software and AI and blockchain, it's just extraordinary how much work, as you say, how much work is stimulated. I wanted to ask you about a sort of zooming out a little bit what is your perspective now, having worked on this for quite some time, of the role of those global supply chains in delivering a sustainable future? What's the? If you had to sort of tease out the Duncan Brack theory, how this works, what would your perspective?
Speaker 4:be. So I'm a details person. I'm not sure I go in for a really big um, go on um. So I think I think two things. I think I'm not sure this is an answer to your question, but I'll have a go um.
Speaker 4:One is that trade liberalization is mostly a good thing. Um, I know there's a debate around, know, if you're a kind of really deep environmentalist you might think that trade is always bad. But actually it's about the efficiency of use of resources, and if country X can produce a particular product more efficiently with less input of capital and labor and natural resources than country Y, then it's better. If country X produces it and exports it to country Y, then it's better if country X produces it and exports it to country Y and country Y produces something else that it's better at maybe services, maybe not products and exports it to country X. So the whole basis of international trade in that sense is a sound one.
Speaker 4:The problem where it causes problems for environmental outcomes, because trade is also a magnifier. If you have unsustainable patterns of production without trade, just international trade by itself probably isn't going to help with that. In fact you will just have bigger volumes of the traded products. So the unsustainability will be magnified. But that's not a problem caused by trade. It's a problem caused by the domestic regulation that allowed you to have unsustainable patterns of production in the first place.
Speaker 4:And part of the problem there is that the existing trade system isn't very good at allowing consumer countries, importing countries, to discriminate between products produced sustainably and products produced unsustainably. And that's what the EUDR and other things as well, actually, like the carbon border adjustment mechanisms, are all about. It's about ways of being able to discriminate in international trade, not on the basis of national origin which was why WTO was founded and its main raison d'etre but on the basis of the ways in which products were produced and the environmental impact they have. So I think there are, I think so, two things basically, international trade by and large is a good thing, but it has problems.
Speaker 4:It causes problems, or it can be associated with problems, or it can make problems worse that you can. Some of them you have to address through getting the systems right in the countries of origin, the way you produce products, and some of them you can modify the trade system to do that, and that's, I think I mean that's very largely what I've been working on for almost the last 20 years really and there are different ways of doing it and there are other mechanisms you can use, like public procurement policies or voluntary initiatives by business, but they're all trying to get at the same thing to make sure you trade in the products that you want that cause no or minimal or even positive impacts on the environment, and you exclude the things that are illegal or unsustainable, that you don't want.
Speaker 3:Well, that's the Duncan Brack theory. We just captured it on air Damla on air Damla.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's great, because what Duncan said has this upper vision, so that we see everything and he doesn't reject anything intrinsically, he just evaluates it. That's where the details come from. I understand it now. So I'm going to ask you another point of view. With this big, big visionary Duncan Bragg theory the energy transition, Could we talk about that for a moment? I mean particularly biomass, which you have worked on. What potential do you think that has in a net zero future?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm not particularly an expert on energy policy. I have a kind of broad overview Partly. I'm still involved politically in the Liberal Democrats on a voluntary basis in the party. I'm currently chairing our policy working group on climate policy, so I kind of have a general overview of it all. But I have worked a bit on biomass and again this was a kind of slight accident. Really A lot of the work I've been doing is about pressures on forests.
Speaker 4:So from illegal logging or even sometimes legal logging, I mean legal logging, and actually of course the main driver of deforestation globally is not illegal logging or even legal logging. It's actually clearance for agriculture and sometimes that's illegal and sometimes that's legal. So again we get into the debate around the EUDR and so on. But one of the pressures on forests was harvesting or using forest feedstocks for biomass, for burning in power stations or other institutions, perhaps industrial facilities, to generate heat and power. And in fact this was something I started through Chatham House when the RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds one of the biggest environmental NGOs I think it is the biggest environmental NGO in the UK in terms of membership came to us and said look, we are concerned about the grain pressures on forests. At the time, the UK biomass industry was expanding very rapidly. Major power station uh at drax in north yorkshire was converting. Thinking of converting at the time no, it's beginning to convert. Then, um, it's a coal burning uh unit to biomass. Um and uh. They said we'd like something at the time.
Speaker 4:I think a lot of the debate around biomass was either the companies and some scientists, forest people in general, versus environmental NGOs. I think RSPB saw the value of getting a neutral body like Chatham House, a fairly respected international think tank, to publish something on that. Chatham House itself doesn't express any views, but individual researchers can certainly express views. Itself doesn't express any views, but, you know, individual researchers can certainly express views. So I did um. It took quite a long time to get the report together because I think we're too ambitious in what we were trying to do at the beginning, which was partly looking at patterns of demand and supply, but also assessing the impact on the climate um. So in the end, we just focused on the impact on the climate um and I reached the conclusion this this is published in, I think, 2017, that by and large, it depended very heavily on the type of feedstock that you were using, but most of the feedstocks that were then used at scale probably had a negative impact on the climate.
Speaker 4:So this is particularly true where the feedstock is whole trees, because if you harvest a whole tree and use it for biomass power or heat, you not only put all the stored carbon in the tree into the atmosphere straight away, but you also lose a bit of you probably lose some carbon from the soil where the tree is growing, because quite a significant proportion of carbon forest carbon is stored in the soil. You're disrupting it and also, of course, you lose the future sequestration potential of the tree and even because it will stop growing, obviously it's not there anymore. It won't be absorbing carbon anymore. And even if you replant it straight away, replace it with a new, young tree, the the new tree is absorbing much, much less carbon. I mean it's very substantially less because it's small. It's growing fast, yes, but it's much, much smaller. Smaller amounts of leaf cover, smaller amounts of wood in the trunk and branches. So it can be a long time decades or sometimes even centuries, depending on the species and the climate and so on until the mature tree reaches the same level of carbon sequestration, as the tree you've just cut down, and there have been lots of attempts to measure what's called the carbon payback period, the period whereby you get back to the situation you would have been in if you hadn't harvested the tree, and, as I said, they can vary from years to decades to centuries depending on the feedstock. So our conclusion in that paper was that only the feedstocks with a minimum carbon payback period should be eligible for government support, because the industry doesn't exist, would only exist at the scale it does, because of government support from the UK and other countries.
Speaker 4:And there are things like sawmill wastes and residues or logging residues, stuff that might be left in the forest otherwise, but of course there's quite a small volume of that available.
Speaker 4:It also has other uses. You can use it to produce engineered wood products like MDF, which is basically just sawdust and glue, and often it's burned in the sawmills to create energy there. So that level of heat stock I think you could say it would be positive for the atmosphere, particularly if it would otherwise just be burnt as waste. But that means an industry that's much, much smaller than you would get at the moment and, unsurprisingly, drax and the rest of the biomedicine industry. Well, I'm not sure I was ever on their Christmas card list, but I'm certainly not now, and they really didn't like the fact, I think, that it wasn't an environmental NGO, a campaigning NGO, that published it. It was a respected think tank, so they went to some lengths to try and dismiss it and undermine it. But you know, we published a series of other reports which I think has helped to understand, feed the growing skepticism about the impact of biomass.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's fascinating have you been to drax duncan? I'm not actually. No, it's a. It is a I've I've been, and it's when you're in there. Because of the era it was built in, which is the sort of 50 I don't know, 50s or 60s. It's got that mid-century modernist feel of a bond villain lair and and I absolutely loved going there. I mean, it messed with my head a little bit. This coal-fired power station was claiming to be carbon neutral. But anyway, I wanted to ask you something completely different, almost at the last question, and this one is a little bit sort of wearing your political hat, because you are politically engaged and you've worked in government and we'd love to get your take. We've talked about this a few times on the podcast about where we are across europe in terms of commitments, green policies, um, and are we stable in that space? We're going to continue our course in our direction and internationally, actually, it's quite a turbulent space at the moment, isn't it international collaboration on the major challenges we face environmentally? What's your take on that at the moment?
Speaker 4:yeah. So I think this is quite worrying and we've seen this um very recently, just over the last few weeks actually, with the eu deforestation regulation, because when the commission tabled their proposal for an extra delay, this was actually an amendment to the the existing regulation, and the trouble with that it meant that when it went through the council, the representatives of member state governments and also the parliament, it could be open to other amendments. Anybody could propose amendments to add to that amendment and indeed the parliament did exactly that. Because the problem now is the parliament, for the first time, I think, since its existence, now has a right-wing majority. So the EPP group, but basically the Christian Democrats so you could view them as fairly sort of moderate right-wingers are the swing group in the middle, but if they vote together with the three or four I can't remember how many there are now right-wing to far right-wing groups they have a majority in the parliament and they added a number of amendments, sometimes by very small majorities, like three um number of amendments to the, just the delay amendment to. Basically, without going to details, they would have undermined the proposal quite substantially.
Speaker 4:Um, what happens in the eu? You have to get both legislative chambers, the council and the parliament in agreement, you, he went back to the council, the council threw them all out and then it went into a process of what they call trilogue negotiation between the two plus the commission, and just on Tuesday of this week they reached final agreement and all of those amendments have been excluded. But so that's a good outcome in the end. But it shows what might happen, I think, and there is growing concern about cost of living impact on businesses, the cost of environmental, the transition to net zero, et cetera. I mean you can see these as investments. Well, they are, because they will pay returns in the future, but they are nevertheless costs. You need investment capital to start with.
Speaker 4:So this is clearly affecting I think it's beginning to affect well clearly it's been affecting the debate in the UK and we saw the Conservative government sort of row back from some of its commitments. Fortunately, the new Labour government, I think, has made a good start. It remains to be seen whether their rather timid economic policy will undermine their ambitions there and particularly their refusal to contemplate much better links with Europe In the EU. I think the European Parliament now has a right-wing majority. The Council isn't quite there yet, but you know they're a member state. There are governments changing all the time. There'll be an election in Germany. We may see a swing. You can see what's happening in France at the moment. You may see the council have a more right wing majority as well, and that does. I think that does risk rowing back on some of the actually really quite ambitious legislation they passed in the last term. So I think it's a matter of concern in the last term.
Speaker 2:So I think it's a matter of concern. Yeah, well, maybe steve our next question for the podcast with an uh, duncan, in another episode, shelby, why couldn't we make the green agenda a topic for all, not only a leftist agenda, but an agenda for all? Maybe that is another course that we have to take in, but unfortunately our time is limited. So I have to ask you, duncan, the last question and the final question is this our network is ironically called do not smile, because we need to make sustainability that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:my daughter, she I got married and her children. Well, I've only got one child quite late, so I'm quite a quite an old parent, but she's just turned 12 and she is an enormous source of joy almost all the time and it's her future, basically, that we're trying to get a better place for her and her friends.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, duncan. You're preaching to a very, very converted choir over here on that one, and thank you so much. The other topic I think we need to go back to Damla, now that we've explored Brackonomics, as I now am going to call it, is your point around the EU. Duncan is so right in terms of Britain. I mean, we're at that moment where it would make such a difference both to Britain but also to Europe if we came back closer again.
Speaker 4:It's mind-boggling that we're not doing it. Yeah, absolutely. I chaired the Liberal Democrat Working Group on UK-EU relations. We published a paper two and a half years ago now actually almost three years ago which basically charted a roadmap to rejoin, putting emphasis on just improving the relationship. And we'd have to do that. You couldn't rejoin straight away anyway. You'd have to improving the relationship and we'd have to do that. You couldn't rejoin straight away anyway. You have to rebuild the relationship. We went through a series of steps where you can do that gradually, culminating in rejoining a single market. All of it should be good for the uk economy and the eu, even if you don't then rejoin. But you have to go through it all to rejoin.
Speaker 4:But selling that message is quite hard and I mean the liberal democrat campaign in the election election in July never talked about it at all. It was in the manifesto. We made sure of that. But the campaign was very heavily focused on sort of more everyday issues like cost of living, nhs, carers, social care, stuff like that, and I can understand why. And it was clearly very successful because you know we've got 72 MPs. I know you did great. It was amazing. But it was a little bit frustrating to some of us in the party that those kind of bigger issues which government will have to deal with weren't dealt with at all. So I think it's a question of finding the right language. How do you get into this argument without raising the fears that we're just going to see a repeat of all the bitterness and division.
Speaker 4:I know.
Speaker 3:I know exactly. Well, that is a really big question we're going to have to put on pause for another day. Duncan, it's been absolutely brilliant talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Damla and myself. Damla back to you.
Speaker 2:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can work together to create a more sustainable future. So, duncan Damla, see you soon.
Speaker 2:See you, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
