Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), project TRACC asks how sustainable supply chain initiatives ‘see’ deforestation, what they remain blind to, and how they attribute responsibility for it. Three scales are engaged: the transnational level where ZDIs are designed and implemented, the ground-level where crops are established and forests lost, and the company-level where decisions of whether and how to engage those initiatives occur. We focus on two of the EUDR’s included ‘forest risk commodities’ – rubber and cocoa – selected for the prevalence of deforestation, smallholder producers, and ZDIs with heavy reliance on geospatial data in each sector. At the two more granular scales, we focus on the rubber sector, in which deforestation is particularly entangled with corporate land grabs, small farmer land tenure struggles, and market exclusion.

We propose this research at a pivotal moment in the evolution of global approaches to deforestation. The EU Deforestation Regulation will come into effect by the end of 2026 and represents the most stringent, large-scale zero-deforestation supply chain initiative enacted in history. It has already spurred shifts across commodity sectors and scrambles to pilot, assess, and improve methods for implementation which our research will inform.

For more details, please write to us at TRACC.Project@ubc.ca