Rachael Garrett

Last Name

Garrett

First Name

Rachael

ORCID

0000-0002-6171-263X

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Publications 1 - 10 of 54

The challenge of commodity-centric governance in sacrifice frontiers: Evidence from the Brazilian Cerrado's soy sector
Levy, Samuel A.; Garik, Anna Victoria Nogueira; Garrett, Rachael (2024)
Geoforum
Conservation governance is increasingly globalized, particularly supply chain polices implemented by multinational corporations. However, the ways that local elite narratives and power networks influence the design and implementation of policies is poorly understood. We examine the role that local agribusiness narratives have on producers’ resistance to supply chain policies through the concept of the “sacrifice frontier”. We theorize sacrifice frontiers are regions where reinforcing perceptions that conversion of native vegetation has high economic potential and low conservation importance combine with rapid processes of wealth and power consolidation by agribusiness interests. We posit that these dimensions of a sacrifice frontier make rapid land use change and ongoing social and ecological harm especially probable as they reinforce constraints on sustainability governance. Here, we build on existing theories of environmental sacrifice through the case of the Cerrado biome, Brazil's most active deforestation frontier. We argue that in the Cerrado, and other sacrifice frontiers like it, interventions that seek to reduce native vegetation loss cannot rely on supply-chain led policies, but instead need to foster more territorial multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder discussions to alter the narrative of sociocultural and biodiversity sacrifice locally. We suggest this can be achieved by paying attention to local needs in a manner that is inclusive to all land users present within a targeted landscape.
Exploring natural and social drivers of forest degradation in post-Soviet Georgia
Cortner, Owen; Chen, Shijuan; Olofsson, Ponuts; et al. (2024)
Global Environmental Change
The Caucasus Mountains harbor high concentrations of endemic species and provide an abundance of ecosystem services yet are significantly understudied compared to other ecosystems in Eurasia. In the country of Georgia, at the heart of the Caucasus region, forest degradation has been the largest land change process over the last thirty years. The prevailing narrative is that legal and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood is primarily responsible for this process. Yet, since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the country has undergone rapid socioeconomic and institutional changes which have not been explored as drivers of forest change. We combine newly available land-cover change estimates, Georgian statistical data, and historical institutional change data to examine socioeconomic drivers of forest degradation. Our analysis controls for concurrent changes in climate that would affect degradation and examines variation at the regional (state) level from 2011 to 2019, as well as at the national level from 1987 to 2019. We find that higher winter temperature and drought are associated with higher degradation at the regional scale, while major institutional changes and drought are associated with higher forest degradation at the national level. Access to natural gas, the major energy alternative to fuelwood, had no significant association with degradation. Our results challenge the narrative that poverty and a lack of alternative energy infrastructure drive forest degradation and suggest that government policies banning household fuelwood cutting, including the new Forest Code of 2020, may not reduce forest degradation. Given these results, improved data on wood harvesting and more research on the commercial drivers of degradation and their links to economic and political reforms is needed to better inform forest policy in the region, especially given ongoing risks from climate change.
Explaining the stickiness of supply chain relations in the Brazilian soybean trade
Reis, Tiago N.P.; Ribeiro, Vivian; Garrett, Rachael; et al. (2023)
Global Environmental Change
The global trade of agricultural commodities has profound social-ecological impacts, from potentially increasing food availability and agricultural efficiency, to displacing local communities, and to incentivizing environmental destruction. Supply chain stickiness, understood as the stability in trading relationships between supply chain actors, moderates the impacts of agricultural commodity production and the possibilities for supply-chain interventions. However, what factors determine stickiness, that is, how and why farmers, traders, food processors, and consumer countries, develop and maintain trading relationships with specific producing regions, remains unclear. Here, we use data on the Brazilian soy supply chain, a mixed methods approach based on extensive actor-based fieldwork, and an explanatory regression model, to identify and explore the factors that influence stickiness between places of production and supply chain actors. We find four groups of factors to be important: economic incentives, institutional enablers and constraints, social and power dimensions, and biophysical and technological conditions. Among the factors we explore, surplus capacity in soy processing infrastructure, (i.e., crushing and storage facilities) is important in increasing stickiness, as is export-oriented production. Conversely, volatility in market demand expressed by farm-gate soy prices and lower land-tenure security are key factors reducing stickiness. Importantly, we uncover heterogeneity and context-specificity in the factors determining stickiness, suggesting tailored supply-chain interventions are beneficial. Understanding supply chain stickiness does not, in itself, provide silver-bullet solutions to stopping deforestation, but it is a crucial prerequisite to understanding the relationships between supply chain actors and producing regions, identifying entry points for supply chain sustainability interventions, assessing the effectiveness of such interventions, forecasting the restructuring of trade flows, and considering sourcing patterns of supply chain actors in territorial planning.
Public policies and global forest conservation: Empirical evidence from national borders
Wuepper, David; Crowther, Thomas; Lauber, Thomas; et al. (2024)
Global Environmental Change
Protecting the world’s remaining forests is a global policy priority. Even though the value of the world’s remaining forests is global in nature, much of the protection has to come from national policies. Here, we combine global, high resolution remote sensing data on forest outcomes (tree-cover loss, forest degradation, net primary production) and two complementary econometric research designs for causal inference to first quantify how much it matters in which country a forest is located, secondly, the role of public policies, and third, under which conditions such pubic policies tend to be most successful. We find considerable border discontinuities in remotely sensed forest outcomes around the world (in a regression discontinuity design) and these are largely explained by countries’ policies (using a differences-in-discontinuities design). We estimate that public policies reduce the risk of tree cover loss by almost 4 percentage points globally, but there is large variation around this. The best explanations we find for these heterogenous treatment effects are a country’s policy enforcement, its policy stringency, its property rights, and its rule of law (in that order). Our results motivate international cooperation to finance and improve (a) countries’ public policies for forest protection and (b) countries’ capacity to implement and enforce them well.
Six research priorities to support corporate due-diligence policies
Sellare, Jorge; Börner, Jan; Brugger, Fritz; et al. (2022)
Nature
Laws to stamp out deforestation, pollution and child labour in global supply chains might have unintended consequences. Researchers need to investigate these effects.
Cocoa plantations are associated with deforestation in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana
Kalischek, Nikolai; Lang, Nico; Renier, Cécile; et al. (2023)
Nature Food
Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s largest producers of cocoa, account for two thirds of the global cocoa production. In both countries, cocoa is the primary perennial crop, providing income to almost two million farmers. Yet precise maps of the area planted with cocoa are missing, hindering accurate quantification of expansion in protected areas, production and yields and limiting information available for improved sustainability governance. Here we combine cocoa plantation data with publicly available satellite imagery in a deep learning framework and create high-resolution maps of cocoa plantations for both countries, validated in situ. Our results suggest that cocoa cultivation is an underlying driver of over 37% of forest loss in protected areas in Côte d’Ivoire and over 13% in Ghana, and that official reports substantially underestimate the planted area (up to 40% in Ghana). These maps serve as a crucial building block to advance our understanding of conservation and economic development in cocoa-producing regions.
Designing effective and equitable zero-deforestation supply chain policies
Grabs, Janina; Cammelli, Federico; Levy, Samuel A.; et al. (2021)
Global Environmental Change
In response to the clearing of tropical forests for agricultural expansion, agri-food companies have adopted promises to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains in the form of ‘zero-deforestation commitments’ (ZDCs). While there is growing evidence about the environmental effectiveness of these commitments (i.e., whether they meet their conservation goals), there is little information on how they influence producers’ opportunity to access sustainable markets and related livelihood outcomes, or how design and implementation choices influence tradeoffs or potential synergies between effectiveness and equity in access. This paper explores these research gaps and makes three main contributions by: i) defining and justifying the importance of analyzing access equity and its relation to effectiveness when implementing forest-focused supply chain policies such as ZDCs, ii) identifying seven policy design principles that are likely to maximize synergies between effectiveness and access equity, and iii) assessing effectiveness-access equity tensions and synergies across common ZDC implementation mechanisms amongst the five largest firms in each of the leading agricultural forest-risk commodity sectors: palm oil, soybeans, beef cattle, and cocoa. To enhance forest conservation while avoiding harm to the most vulnerable farmers in the tropics, it is necessary to combine stringent rules with widespread capacity building, greater involvement of affected actors in the co-production of implementation mechanisms, and support for alternative rural development paths.
Can sustainability certification enhance the climate resilience of smallholder farmers? The case of Ghanaian cocoa
Thompson, William J.; Blaser-Hart, Wilma J.; Jörin, Jonas; et al. (2022)
Journal of Land Use Science
Sustainability certification has been posited as a key governance mechanism to enhance the climate resilience of smallholder farmers. Whilst many certifications now include climate resilience in their standards, their ability to deliver this for smallholders remains untested. We take the case of the 2015-16 drought-shock to cocoa production in Ghana to examine whether certification can enhance smallholder climate resilience. We used a novel transdisciplinary methodology combining participatory outcome definition with household surveys, biophysical measurements, satellite data and counterfactual analysis. Utilising our climate resilience framework, we find that certification has a strong effect on the adoption of basic management, e.g. fertilization, but a weak influence on more complex resilience strategies, e.g. agroforest diversification. Beyond certification, we identify strong regional patterns in resilience. These findings suggest that certification has some potential to enhance climate resilience but greater focus on facilitating diversification and adapting to subnational contexts is required for improved effectiveness.
What are sustainability indicators for?
Garrett, Rachael; Latawiec, Agnieszka E. (2015)
Sustainability Indicators in Practice ~ Sustainability Indicators in Practice
Incentives and barriers to private finance for forest and landscape restoration
Löfqvist, Sara; Garrett, Rachael; Ghazoul, Jaboury (2023)
Nature Ecology & Evolution
Increased private finance can accelerate forest and landscape restoration globally. Here we conduct semi-structured interviews with asset managers, corporations and restoration finance experts to examine incentives and barriers to private restoration finance. Next, we assess what type of restoration projects and regions appeal to different private funders and how current financial barriers can be overcome. We show that market incentives for corporations include meeting net-emission-reduction commitments, impact and sustainable branding opportunities, and promotion of sustainability in supply chains. Conversely, asset managers face stronger barriers to investing in restoration as it is deemed a high-risk, unknown investment with low profitability. We find that investment finance biases towards restoration projects in low-risk areas and corporate finance towards areas with business presence. Both private finance types tend to omit projects focusing on natural regeneration. Through expanded and diversified markets for restoration benefits, strong public policy support and new financial instruments, private finance for restoration can be scaled for a wider variety of restoration projects in more diverse geographical contexts.

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