By Jennifer Skene, Expert Blog, Natural Resources Defense Council
WITH THE STROKE OF A PEN in the European Union, the broken forest policy framework that, for three decades, obscured the Global North’s responsibility for forest destruction just came crashing down. Just hours before the start of the UN biodiversity conference in Montreal (COP15) and despite obstructionist efforts from Canada, the European Parliament reached an agreement on a groundbreaking trade regulation that is poised to transform global forest supply chains and usher in a new, more globally equitable era of forest protection. For the first time, forest policy will hold Canada and other northern countries accountable for their impacts by addressing not just deforestation, but also forest degradation–defined explicitly to include industrial logging in irreplaceable primary forests.
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