Major Fashion Brands are Contributing to Cambodian Deforestation

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Major Fashion Brands are Contributing to Cambodian Deforestation

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Major clothing brands contribute to deforestation in Cambodia, report finds
by Elizabeth Claire Alberts on 3 December 2021

A new report suggests that the garment industry is contributing to deforestation in Cambodia due to factories relying on illegal forest wood to generate electricity.
Garment factories were found to use at least 562 tons of forest wood every day, the equivalent of up to 1,418 hectares (3,504 acres) of forest being burned each year, according to the report.
Between 2001 and 2019, Cambodia is reported to have lost an estimated 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of forest through deforestation.
While the garment industry does contribute deforestation, experts say that economic land concessions granted by the Cambodian government for agro-industrial purposes are by far the dominant driver of forest loss.


A drone camera soars over a timber yard where thousands of tons of logs are strewn across the ground. In one clip, a bulldozer scoops up a heap of wood while black smoke billows out of its exhaust pipe. In another, workers load wood onto the back of several truck beds. The wood is not being prepared for sale, but will be used for another purpose: to fuel fires that will keep the electricity running in the large garment factory attached to the timber yard, located about an hour south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Laurie Parsons, a geographer at the University of London’s Royal Holloway, says this particular factory produces clothes for major brands in the U.K., and also provides ironing services for other garment factories. When this factory is at peak capacity, Parsons estimates, it uses hundreds of tons of firewood each day to help keep the fires burning.

Where is this wood coming from? In many cases, it’s being illegally taken from forests, adding pressure to Cambodia’s considerable deforestation issue, according to a recent report published Oct. 13 by Royal Holloway.

In June and July 2021, a team of researchers visited and surveyed hundreds of garment factories in Cambodia that make clothes for companies like Lidl, Gap, and H&M. Out of about 600 factories registered with the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC), they found that about one in three were using some forest wood on a regular basis, despite it being illegal to harvest and use forest wood for fires in Cambodia.

“It’s still widely used,” Parsons, the lead author of the new report, tells Mongabay in a video call. “It just demonstrates the scale of the issue.”

‘Substantial concern’

Cambodia has experienced one of the highest rates of deforestation of any country in the past several decades. In 1970, Cambodia had an estimated 13.2 million hectares (32.6 million acres) of forest cover, which accounted for more than 73% of the country’s territory. But the expansion of agriculture and industry has led to a dramatic decrease in forest cover, with deforestation accelerating in the last two decades.

Between 2001 and 2019, Cambodia lost an estimated 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of forest, according to a recent report published by the Land Portal Foundation. This deforestation represents about 26.4% of the forest cover that existed in 2000. Data collected by Global Forest Watch also showed that between 2001 and 2018, the country lost 557,000 hectares (1.38 million acres) of tree cover in protected areas, accounting for an 11.7% loss in these regions. A report published this year by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime notes that some protected areas in Cambodia have become so degraded that “they no longer have much, if any, natural habitat.”
ImageImage by Thomas Cristofoletti / Royal Holloway.
The Royal Holloway report says the Cambodian garment industry’s contribution to deforestation, in combination with its carbon emissions, represents a “substantial concern.” However, the authors say the issue has gotten very little attention, as deforestation in Cambodia is mostly attributed to “land concessions linked to high value wood.”

Cambodian garment factories represented by GMAC are said to burn an average of 562 tons of forest wood every day, the equivalent of 810-1,418 hectares (2,002-3,504 acres) of forest being burned each year, according to the report.

Parsons says these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, since “some of the biggest offenders were most difficult to reach and least likely to cooperate.” For instance, Parsons and his team were not able to get any information from the large garment factory featured in the drone footage.

GMAC did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment on these figures.
Full article: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/major ... ort-finds/
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Re: Major Fashion Brands are Contributing to Cambodian Deforestation

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Totally misleading headline...
Ex Bitteeinbit/LexusSchmexus
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Re: Major Fashion Brands are Contributing to Cambodian Deforestation

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Pulitzer Center
July 12, 2023
Forests in the Furnace: Can Fashion Brands Tackle Illegal Logging in Their Cambodian Supply Chains?
Country: Cambodia

Authors: Gerald Flynn
Rainforest Investigations Fellow

Andy Ball
Southeast Asia RJF Grantee

Global fashion brands touting sustainability claims continue to buy from their contract factories in Cambodia that burn illegally logged wood in their boilers.
Mongabay reached out to 14 international brands that listed factories identified in a report as using illegal forest wood, but they either didn’t respond or evaded questions on illegal logging in their supply chains.
One prominent brand, Sweden’s H&M, has developed an app that allows its partner factories to identify deliveries of forest wood, but industry insiders say there are ways to circumvent it, and that the government should be playing a bigger role in the issue.
*Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities.


KAMPONG SPEU, Cambodia — “Going into the forest is dangerous, some people die when trees fall on them, but they are desperate,” said Saroeun*, a logger who makes multiple trips each day into Central Cardamoms National Park in southwest Cambodia’s Kampong Speu province.

“They don’t know what else to do: if we don’t go to cut trees, we don’t have money,” he added. “I go every day and risk my life. I struggle and have to persist with my life in the forest.”

The timber that Saroeun illegally cuts and transports from the forest to his village of Kteh will change hands many times, being bought and sold until it comes to rest in a garment factory, possibly in Kampong Speu province, neighboring Kandal province or further afield in Phnom Penh. Whichever factory buys the wood, it will be incinerated to generate thermal energy used for steaming, washing, dyeing or ironing fabrics — likely as part of an international fashion brand’s supply chain.

Whistleblowers and others in possession of sensitive information of public concern can now securely and confidentially share tips, documents, and data with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN), its editors, and journalists.

But Saroeun has no way of knowing this from his wooden stilted house on the outskirts of the forest, largely because he’s insulated — and isolated — by the seemingly deliberate opacity of garment factories’ supply chain. He risks life, limb and liberty each day to scrape by on the few dollars’ profit he can eke out of forest crimes.

And while he’s part of an informal network of illegal loggers who have been cutting, transporting and selling timber to meet the demands of Cambodia’s garment factories for decades, he’s just one of hundreds if not thousands whose logging fuels the factories that fashion brands buy from.

The global fashion industry, valued at $2.5 trillion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, is no stranger to allegations that its vast profits have come at the expense of forests worldwide. In November 2021, the nonprofit Slow Factory implicated more than 100 international brands in deforestation across the Amazon that was largely linked to opaque cattle supply chains feeding both the beef and fashion industries.

Beyond leather, other materials that the fashion industry relies upon, like rubber, have also been tied to the clearing of huge tracts of forest to make way for commodity plantations. In Cambodia, rubber plantations have seen people lose their farms, homes and freedom in the land disputes between plantation owners and often Indigenous communities.

Even the fashion industry’s attempts to reduce its sprawling environmental footprint have come under scrutiny, with a rising demand for cellulose fabrics having resulted in the loss of “ancient and endangered forests” along with the destruction of other ecosystems to make way for more plantations.

Other environmental impacts of the fashion industry are more direct.

Roughly a third of the estimated 1,200 garment factories across Cambodia were burning through an average of 562 metric tons of forest wood every day, using it as fuel for generating thermal energy, according to researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London, who conducted a study in 2021.

In 2019, international sustainability-focused NGO GERES reported that 70% of the wood used by Cambodian garment factories was sourced from natural forests. According to GERES, some 300,000 metric tons of wood are burned by Cambodian factories each year, releasing roughly 368,000 metric tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere in the process. This makes up more than 38% of the estimated 780,000 metric tons of wood that are burned by Cambodia’s industrial sector every year, according to GERES.
Long read: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/fore ... ply-chains
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