The adoption of the Deforestation-free Products Regulation represents a significant step forward in the protection of forests, both in the EU and in non-EU countries. In particular, it aims at minimising the risk of deforestation and forest degradation associated with products that contain, have been fed with, or have been made using certain commodities (cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya, and wood). Environmental protection is achieved through provisions affecting the placing and making available of and export from the EU market of the relevant products, including a due diligence framework to ensure that such commodities are deforestation-free and legal under the law of the country of origin. While the Regulation has a clear environmental goal, it could also be seen as an operationalisation of the One Health approach as it tackles several drivers of environmental degradation (land-use change, biodiversity decline, and GHG emissions/climate change). In particular, this Regulation makes for a noteworthy case study in light of its extraterritorial reach, and it is examined in view of the unacknowledged ramifications for the One Health.

This chapter examines the national-scale origins and political linkages of land mafias and rural militias in Brazil. These linkages, especially to political power, explain how, over just a few decades, an RDPE of active and open land-grabbing mafias has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand an RDPE system to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system. The land-grabbing process is linked to illegalities and violence, which are mutually self-reinforcing through the logics operating in these systems. This chapter examines the rapid post-2019 transformation of pastures into monoculture soybean or corn plantations, especially in southeastern Acre and along the paved BR-163 highway. Part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing and its mafia-like tactics, whose continuation is ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. The situation worsened, especially during the reign of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), as land mafia dynamics penetrated deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

A new theoretical framework is required to expose how the underlying political economic systems function and drive deforestation. The hypotheses and case studies are presented while situating deforesting processes in the international system and its many subsystems, which are composed of partially interlinked sectors that often compete for the same land areas. This is a detailed political economic analysis, based on regionally situated world-ecological analyses, which consider the power that different sectors have in causing the loss of forests, such as Brazilian ranching speculation, Amazonian gold mining, and Finnish pulp and energywood forestry. The chapter contends that there is a need to cultivate a deeper, comparative, and global crises-situated understanding of the role these forces have in driving deforesting. One must also understand the local-level enabling factors and the role of resistance. Insights are woven together from several disciplines and approaches such as political ecology and world-ecology into a new conceptual framework that can be widely applied to explain global development dynamics, beyond the specific application to deforestation.

This chapter discusses the relation of global extractivisms to global deforestation, making novel claims about the role of forests in the international system. This is a global, world-ecological analysis of why forests seem to have not mattered in the interstate system and how they are still overlooked in favor of a free flow of commodity trade and interstate competition. The impacts of the world system on forests are explored over the past 5,000 years, focusing especially on the past 550 years. “Epochal moments,” for example, wars or events like the COVID-19 pandemic, are particularly detrimental to retaining the world’s old-growth forests. One should avoid overgeneralizations of how global capitalism or humanity (as the “Anthropocene”) drive deforestation. Thus, the chapter utilizes a long-term, world-system perspective, focusing on how the current structures of the world-system drive deforestation. The chapter uncovers how the nature of the interstate system affects the efforts by global environmental governance and other means to try to curb or control deforestation. This curbing is fundamentally restricted by the lobbying and political power of RDPEs.

The conclusion unites the key empirical, theoretical, and methodological lessons, showcasing findings on the causes of deforestation relevant for several scholarly fields. The book’s original contribution and approach highlight the importance of RDPEs as the ultimate cause of deforestation. These RDPEs are also building blocks of global capitalism and regional drivers of deforestation, enabled by state actions, yet simultaneously resisted by progressive state and civil society actors. Ranching-grabbing in Brazil and gold mining–organized crime in the Amazon are explored as particularly important extractivist systems that help to explain deforestation in the Amazon at a deeper level. The book also discusses clearcutting and how it is driven by the aims of the pulping, papermaking, and wood energy sectors in Finland. Finland is a Nordic welfare state in the EU, which provides a novel comparison of how regionally dominant extractivist systems can vary yet still cause loss of forests across the North–South divide in the world-system. The lessons are related to broader discussions around global forests and deforestation.

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.

Chapter 12 evaluates the challenges of SDG 15: Life on Land, which aims to protect and restore terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and stop biodiversity loss. The proximate and underlying drivers of deforestation and biodiversity loss that have led to the drastic decline of plant and animal species, threatening “biological annihilation,” are explained. Ending nature’s underpricing can be achieved by eliminating harmful subsidies, charging for environmentally damaging products, and enforcing regulations that can help protect forests and biodiversity. Increased investments in the conservation and restoration of forest ecosystems can be achieved through market-based tools such as biodiversity offsets, ecosystem service payments, debt-for-nature swaps, green bonds, and sustainable supply chains. Rethinking the international framework for an agreement on global forest and biodiversity conservation and restoration strategies may involve fostering the involvement and investment of the private sector, which has substantial revenue to gain from forest ecosystems and biodiversity conservation.

In the history of international environmental law, the 1920s and 1930s and the role of the League of Nations have been neglected so far.

The chapter explores they ways the League, as one of the first institutions of its kind, started to discuss nature protection. It reveals the dilemmas of environmental and industrial–economic interest of a world that strove to overcome the aftermath of the Great War. Furthermore, the authors study the political, legal and institutional motivations that play a role in the discussions. Pressing problems – overfishing, whaling, destruction of wildlife, pollution of the coasts and seas – were brought to the attention of the League. The chapter analyses the League’s role in drafting the first conventions aiming at regulating the use of the global commons and setting the stage for future environmental governance.

Moreover, the chapter sheds light on the unique role played by transnational organizations, NGOs, civil society groups and non-state actors in campaigns and efforts for the protection of nature and the environment, and for the preservation of natural resources in a fast-changing world.

The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.