CLEVER’s Pathways From Global Trade to Biodiversity Policy Action

on September 9, 2025

What does it take to make Europe’s global trade truly sustainable for biodiversity? At the Mainstreaming Biodiversity for Policy Making conference in Brussels, CLEVER presented insights from three years of research on how EU trade and consumption affect ecosystems worldwide. Our work focuses on three main areas: the Brazilian soy value chain, timber from Cameroon, Brazil, and Gabon, and aquaculture in Vietnam. These commodities are expanding into ecologically sensitive regions, driving deforestation, threatening biodiversity, and impacting local communities.

As the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) begins to take effect, CLEVER engaged with policymakers, civil society, and scientists to share evidence and tools—such as biodiversity indicators, trade analysis, and policy evaluation—that can help identify leverage points for reducing Europe’s biodiversity footprint.

For CLEVER, the event marked a milestone in a longer journey of collaboration, innovation, and systems thinking. As part of the Horizon Europe Cluster on Transformative Change for Biodiversity, our work goes beyond understanding impacts to shaping solutions toward more sustainable and equitable trade.

Measuring and quantifying biodiversity impacts

To design effective policies, we first need clear evidence of how trade affects nature. CLEVER tackled this challenge by developing tools that make biodiversity impacts visible and measurable. Partners from UFMG shared progress on biodiversity loss and endemism projections in Brazil, taking into account uncertainties such as climate change and mitigation policies. This forward-looking approach helps anticipate future risks, making it possible to design policies that are both preventive and adaptive.

Another highlight was an innovative spatially explicit framework, developed by our partners at UPV and BC3, which pinpoints the biodiversity and environmental impacts of Brazilian soybean exports with remarkable precision. This tool not only identifies the municipalities where soybean production is most harmful but also reveals which importing countries bear the greatest responsibility for species decline. Such insights are crucial for policymakers, enabling them to target the most impactful points in the supply chain.

By making these connections clear, CLEVER provides the scientific foundation for policies that can truly reduce Europe’s global biodiversity footprint.

Leverage points and governance implications

The EUDR formed a pertinent case in the different talks. A clear message that came through the presentations was that leverage points for the governance of commodity supply chains exist and must be tackled in multiple areas. This includes ensuring coherence of policies related to the production and trade of forest and agricultural commodities between supply-and demand-side countries. Also, transnational regulations like the EUDR should build on international cooperation in order to maximize its impacts and avoid outcomes that see companies merely seeking technical compliance and reshuffling their supply chains instead of adopting measures that truly tackle deforestation.

Building on these insights, CLEVER released a research output in August 2025 summarizing policy recommendations through the Innovation Action Pool. This initiative identifies governance innovations that can be scaled up to create sustainable supply chains that protect biodiversity while ensuring fair production practices. The report targets state actors and business associations in both producing and consuming countries. Based on stakeholder input, the Innovation Action Pool focuses on adapting and scaling proven governance models rather than introducing entirely new instruments, prioritizing inclusiveness and context-specific solutions that respond to real stakeholder needs.

Reducing EU footprints in the world

The real challenge is turning this knowledge into practical, fair, and effective action. During the panel discussion at the conference, experts from policy, science, and civil society highlighted solutions that are already showing promise: regenerative agriculture, traceability systems, payments for ecosystem services, and innovative financing tools for smallholders. These align with CLEVER’s emphasis on systemic change, but achieving lasting progress requires more than isolated interventions. Strong policy coherence, cross-sector collaboration, and political commitment are essential to move from insights to meaningful, system-level implementation.

Engaging People, Amplifying Impact

To maximise outreach and impact, CLEVER placed strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement and communication throughout the project. Online and in-person workshops and interviews with stakeholders from Europe, Brazil, Cameroon and Gabon brought together local actors across sectors, ensuring that the voices of those most affected by biodiversity loss were reflected in our work. Stakeholder input gathered through these activities directly shaped the content, design, and priorities of the project outputs, such as the Innovation Action Pool, by grounding it in the lived realities, sectoral knowledge, and practical constraints described by those working in the commodity supply chains.

Communication was also key to impact, with researchers receiving training that supported their active involvement in producing outputs like the project video and “Four key narratives on global trade, forests, and policy” that made our work more accessible.

Amid data and policies, storytelling emerged during the event as a vital tool for driving change. By connecting emotionally to biodiversity, stories amplify local voices and inspire action. Combined with CLEVER’s research, they will inform a joint policy brief with concrete recommendations for EU and international decision-makers. Moving forward, we remain committed to advancing biodiversity-sensitive trade and governance as the foundation for a just and sustainable global economy.

CLEVER’s achievements and outputs reflect the combined efforts of its full consortium, including the University of Bonn, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, University of Freiburg, European Forest Institute, Universitat Politècnica de València, IIASA, and UNEP-WCMC. Their expertise and collaboration made this work possible.

Photos by Rosa Castañeda.

Losing Forests by the Minute: New Laws in Cameroon and the EU’s Global Push

on July 8, 2025

Tick-tock. With every minute that passes, roughly ten football (soccer) fields of irreplaceable tropical primary forest vanish from our planet. Deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics have serious local and global impacts, like undermining livelihoods of local communities and peoples, harming biodiversity, and aggravating climate change impacts. The relentless forest loss is particularly critical in regions like Africa’s Congo Basin, which is the second-largest continuous tropical rainforest in the world and a biodiversity hotspot. In hopes of addressing these issues, policy makers have taken different initiatives. Cameroon – a country in the Congo Basin – adopted a revised Forestry Law in 2024, replacing its previous Forestry Law that stemmed from 1994 and appeared long outdated. The revised law regulates and aims to achieve the sustainable use and management of Cameroon’s forest resources, responding to today’s challenges like the climate change. The European Union (EU) has also taken initiative with its Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR). The EUDR aims to minimize the EU’s contribution to deforestation and forest degradation worldwide and thereby reduces global forest loss. This rests on the notion that the EU market imports and consumes forest and agricultural products that fuel forest loss elsewhere. The EUDR focuses on seven such commodities, namely: cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, and wood.

These two initiatives share similar end goals but vary in their approach and scope. Cameroon’s revised Forestry Law is focused on creating clear rules of play in the country’s forest sector, which covers participatory management of forest and wildlife resources, sustainable forest management, forest protection and conservation, and community rights, among other things. The law defines the State’s role of monitoring and enforcement and sets penalties in cases of non-compliance. For Cameroon, the EUDR means EU companies must verify that the seven key commodities imported from Cameroon are legal and haven’t caused deforestation or forest degradation since 2020. To this end, companies in the EU must seek collaboration with their overseas suppliers in ensuring that EUDR provisions are met. For goods to be exported to the EU, companies in Cameroon must document and make available information to their EU buyers about the legality and deforestation-free status of their products. These measures include aspects like providing geolocation information about where commodities were grown and harvested.

Tree trunks loaded onto logging truck in the rain forest of Gabon, Central Africa. Photo by Fabian / Adobe Stock.

Different initiatives like the new Forestry Law and the EUDR can complement and support each other. Cameroon’s revised Forestry Law can help companies with EUDR compliance by seeking to strengthen the monitoring of forestry operations and punishing offenses more severely. The EUDR puts emphasis on legal compliance in countries of origin, like Cameroon, which can strengthen efforts to monitor and ensure compliance with forest and other laws in place. It can also help enhance traceability and transparency of supply chains, because it requires geolocation information of the commodities that are harvested and exported to the EU market – this, in turn, can support the goals of Cameroon’s new Forestry Law.

However, the initiatives also face challenges. For instance, the Forestry Law’s definitions of legal concepts may not align with international standards. Uncertainty also looms over the law’s implementation and enforcement, which has been a pain point with the previous edition of the law due to lacking resources and capacities of the forestry administration, for instance. This casts doubts over its potential effectiveness. The EUDR will also face multiple challenges in its implementation, like ensuring that its provisions are effectively enforced in the EU. The EUDR could also unequally affect producers in Cameroon, because smaller producers may struggle to meet the regulation’s strict requirements. It could also lead producers to divert their exports to other countries, such as China and Vietnam, where sustainability and legality standards are less strict than in the EU. Hence, while the EUDR’s effectiveness remains to be seen, it is already facing serious question marks.

Cameroon is not alone. Other countries in the region, like Gabon, are grappling with the EUDR’s implications while simultaneously devising their own domestic strategies to deal with deforestation. Ultimately, the story is repeated across countries worldwide, because the international trade by the EU means the EUDR has a global reach and each country will have its own interests, preferences, and proposed solutions to forest loss.

That is why it is crucial to seek collaboration among countries, underlining the shared responsibility in tackling deforestation. This is increasingly important in the context of today’s trade policy environment with its tangible tensions, where unilateral measures tend to carry unintended consequences. Hence, collaboration in implementation of regulations is especially essential for the EUDR, because its influence extends across the borders of a single country. Also, regulations like the revised Forestry Law remain the backbone in a domestic context, so their implementation and enforcement should be supported by partner countries. It is for the benefit of forests and communities that different regulations should ideally support each other: by creating a framework that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Simple wooden dugout canoe on Barombi Mbo crater lake of Cameroon, Africa. Photo by Fabian / Adobe Stock.

Authors: Mathias Cramm (European Forest Institute) and Abubakar Ali Shidiki (University of Dschang)

Feature image by MATTHEW / Adobe Stock.

Video: How does our consumption impact forests?

on June 3, 2025

We’re living in a time of growing environmental urgency, and protecting the world’s forests has never been more critical. Rainforests like the Amazon and the Congo Basin play a key role in fighting climate change by storing vast amounts of carbon and supporting incredible biodiversity. Yet these vital ecosystems are under threat—driven by global demand for commodities like soy, beef, and timber. What we consume in Europe often has hidden links to deforestation in distant regions.

Using the case of soy imports from Brazil, this video highlights the complex connections between international regulations, global trade, and biodiversity loss. The CLEVER project provides research to support transformative change by helping shape fairer, more effective policies for forest protection. Watch the video below to better understand the role we all play in protecting our planet’s forests.

Reflections on International Day of Forests

on March 20, 2024

On 21st of March we celebrate the International Day of Forests and the theme for this year is Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World. To acknowledge the importance of technological advancements in forest monitoring, the CLEVER team shared their reflections on how innovative technologies, such as remote sensing and satellite imagery, support scientific research and policy making.

Images by Adobe Stock.

New EU commodity trade rules and related challenges for the timber sector – Views from Cameroon

on November 24, 2023

Imagine you were a vendor selling products on the market. One day, some of your known, old buyers would start demanding assurances that your products fulfil certain requirements; or else, they can no longer buy from you. How would you react? Would you seek to fulfil the new, additional requirements or simply sell your products to other buyers, who demand less? Moreover, how might other concerned actors perceive this situation, such as the government, who regulates the marketplace?

Together with Dr. Shidiki Abubakar Ali and Herman Zanguim from the University of Dschang, I was part of a research team set out to explore these and related questions in the context of the Cameroon-EU timber trade as part of the CLEVER project. In 2023, the EU adopted new market requirements in the Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) for timber and some other commodities and derived products. For timber, the new requirements expand on rules that have been so far in place as part of the EU Timber Regulation. According to the new rules, timber products can be imported to (or exported from) the EU market only if they are legally produced and free of deforestation and forest degradation. With our team, we discussed emerging challenges and how to address them in Cameroon – a country producing and exporting tropical timber – with actors from State institutions, timber businesses, certification bodies, NGOs and the civil society, international organizations, and research and training institutions.

A production forest in Cameroon. *Photo by Herman Zanguim (UDS)*

We found out that awareness of the EUDR is high but knowledge of its details on average is still low among the actors. The EUDR can be seen as complex as it contains a lot of details and technicalities, such as definitions of concepts like deforestation or forest degradation. An issue raised by many was that the EU has poorly communicated about the EUDR and what it might imply for a country like Cameroon. This may, in turn, have led to current lower levels of understanding of the EUDR and even misunderstandings of it, such as that the EU would be encroaching on other countries’ sovereignty with it.

Different stakeholders in Cameroon also found that the EU had insufficiently involved actors in countries outside of the EU in the development of the EUDR, calling for a more participatory approach. Another point made by many was that the EUDR is perceived as overly restrictive and punitive for countries such as Cameroon that still have large areas of forests standing. Actors said that to achieve meaningful impacts, regulations like the EUDR should be more supportive and incentivizing for better governance in the countries where commodities are produced. According to them, a restrictive and punitive approach that they see with the EUDR is doomed to fail in its implementation due to lack of enabling conditions and support in countries of commodity production.

Logs stored at a sawmill in Cameroon. *Photo by Mathias Cramm (EFI)*

Timber businesses, on the other hand, did not appear too fussed about the EUDR. They believe themselves to be well prepared for its application, also because of existing EU regulations like the EU Timber Regulation. And what if their products were no longer accepted “as is” in the EU market? Their response was: Demand is high in Asian markets and buyers from African markets are also increasingly knocking on their door. Thus, there might be no shortage of alternative buyers for their timber products.

It remains to be seen what the real impacts of the EUDR on countries like Cameroon, their timber industry, and their forests will be, after its application begins in 2024-2025. What will happen to the Cameroon-EU timber trade? How will Asian businesses, who import Cameroonian timber and re-export it to the EU, react? Will implementation and enforcement of the EUDR in the EU be possible and effective? Only time will tell, and we’ll hopefully follow the process from the researchers’ point of view.

Written by Mathias Cramm from the European Forest Institute.

Mapping international and local forest and ecosystem-related policies and governance mechanisms

on September 11, 2023

Exciting News! Our CLEVER researchers Laila Berning, Rafaella Ferraz Ziegert, Mathias Cramm and Metodi Sotirov published their latest research. They conducted a comprehensive analysis of forest and ecosystem-related policies and governance mechanisms.

Through extensive research and data analysis, they have compiled a comprehensive Excel database and identified six overarching policy and governance types. These types cover various levels of compulsion, actor participation, and geographical scopes, helping us better understand the regulatory landscape of regulating biomass supply chains for legality and sustainability at international and local levels!

Stay tuned for more insights into a selection of policies and governance mechanisms from the EU, Brazil, Cameroon, and Gabon!

The following research activities will largely focus on the influences of the new EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR). The researchers will see how enterprises, NGOs and state actors react to the EUDR. They will also dive deep into analyzing the role of national policy and governance initiatives from Brazil, Cameroon and Gabon under and beyond the EUDR.

These research activities will help us better understand the unfolding impacts of the EUDR and the implications for deforestation, forest degradation and biodiversity loss. Their insights will support identifying how global agricultural and forest commodity value chains can become more sustainable, both in terms of socio-economic and environmental impacts.

Get all the details here:

Final report: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8328016

Excel database: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8326909

Written by Laila Berning – University of Freiburg

Image by witsarut/AdobeStock