Recommendation 17

HM Government Not Addressed

We are committed to making the UK the best place in the world for green and sustainable investment and were the first country in the world to commit to fully mandatory reporting by businesses across the economy on the financial risks posed by climate change. 6 https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7463/documents/78144/default The UK’s footprint on global biodiversity: Government Response to the Committee’s Second Report 11 We are introducing world-leading legislation through the Environment Act (2021) to tackle illegal deforestation in UK supply chains. This legislation is designed for a very specific purpose: ensuring businesses operating in the UK are not using products that have come from illegally used or occupied land. This law will help us ensure there is no place on our supermarket shelves for commodities that have been grown on land that is illegally occupied or used, and to support other countries to strengthen and enforce their forest protection measures. Our new integrated Sustainability Disclosure Requirements go further by requiring companies, asset managers, asset owners and their investment products to report on the impact they are having on the climate and environment, helping to ensure investors have the information they need to drive positive environmental impact. These disclosures will provide investors and market participants with the information they need to take climate and the environment, including deforestation, into account when making investment decisions. The UK is also helping to tackle greenwashing by implementing the UK green taxonomy which will create a common definition of environmentally sustainable economic activities for investment purposes for the first time. There are also tools being developed specifically to drive transparency in the financial sector in relation to nature, for example the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). These are all parts of a wider package of measures to improve the sustainability of our supply chains and will contribute to global efforts to protect forests and other ecosystems. In the 2030 Nature Compact, we secured the first ever commitment from G7 Leaders to support sustainable supply chains that decouple agricultural production from deforestation and forest degradation. The UK, as COP26 president, has launched the Forest Agriculture and Commodity Trade (FACT) Dialogue, a pioneering campaign to bring governments from around the world together to agree a series of measures to increase the sustainability of agricultural production and in particular reduce deforestation associated with the production of commodities such as cocoa, palm oil and soy. During COP26, commitments have been made to help alter the financial landscape in order to pave the way to halting and reversing forest loss and land degradation by 2030. 12 countries, including the UK, have agreed to provide £8.75 billion of finance and billions more has been pledged by philanthropic donors. CEOs representing assets worth over $8.7 trillion have also committed to eliminating investment in activities linked to agricultural commodity-driven deforestation and governments representing 75% of trade in commodities that can threaten forests have signed up to the FACT Statement.