Eighty-six EU policy options for reducing imported deforestation

Despite the importance of tropical forest conservation in achieving global sustainability goals and the key role of forest-risk commodity trade in driving deforestation, consumer country policy options for reducing imported deforestation have received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on gray literature and a European Commission public consultation, we identify 86 policy options for the European Union to address deforestation. We assess the political feasibility and map the “theory of change” (TOC)—the causal chain through which the policies address deforestation—for each of these policy options, identifying a trade-off between feasibility and potential impacts: information-based and cooperative policies, which dominate our sample, typically exhibit high feasibility, but mostly lack convincing TOCs, while more stringent regulatory and market-based policy options generally have lower feasibility. We propose three principles for overcoming the feasibility-impact dilemma: (1) build policies on proven TOCs, (2) use policy mixes, and (3) work with key stakeholders, supply chains, and regions.S.B. and T.N.P.d.R. acknowledge funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 765408. U.M.P. acknowledges funding from the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, under grants 213:2014-1181 and 2016-00351 (LEAKAGE). The authors wish to thank Rasmus Einarsson for help with collating the European Commission consultation response and Jessica Jewel for insights on how to quantify political feasibility. Finally, we wish to thank Eric F. Lambin, Patrick Meyfroidt, and Florence Pendrill for helpful suggestions during the development of the manuscript. This research contributes to the Global Land Programme