Getting to forest-positive landscapes
Deforestation-free supply chains are not enough. Here's what's missing.
April 17, 2026
By Evan Paul, SVP of Solutions, Chloris Geospatial
Global Canopy’s Forest 500 2026 report came out this week. I sometimes work from their Oxford, UK office, and I’ve observed the team refine this assessment over the years, so I read it closely.
The headline is stark: of the 500 most influential companies in the global deforestation economy, only 4% qualify as leaders. This was supposed to be the year many of the biggest corporate deforestation pledges came due.
That number doesn’t surprise me. But it reflects a structural problem: we are still assessing companies largely in isolation from the landscapes they source from.
The commitment-to-verification gap is still enormous
56% of companies have a public deforestation-free commitment for cocoa. Only 9% can show that more than half their volumes are actually clean. In coffee, 47% have commitments and 5% have verified more than half their volumes. In rubber, 41% have commitments and 0% have done so. Zero.
Forest 500's methodology is transparent. Commitments account for 25% of a company's score. Implementation, reporting, and verification make up the other 75%. Many companies can make commitments; far fewer can demonstrate implementation.
What I hear from the teams we work with is less defensiveness than frustration. Many companies have made real investments in supplier engagement, policy development, and training. But when it comes time to show what is actually happening across a supply chain, the available tools are often not fit for the scale of the task.
A sustainability lead at one of the major cocoa traders put it to me plainly: "We know what our policy says. We don't know what our supply chain says."
You can't audit your way to verified compliance across hundreds of thousands of smallholder farms.
But there’s an important dimension that company-level framing cannot fully capture
Forest 500 is the best public assessment we have of how individual companies are performing on deforestation, and its rigor is real. But it cannot fully capture something the sustainability teams I work with feel acutely.
These companies are being assessed as individual actors, but they do not operate in isolation.
A cocoa trader sourcing from Côte d’Ivoire operates within a broader system. That system is shaped by land tenure policy, local governance capacity, smallholder economics, fire regimes, and competing pressures on the same land. A zero-deforestation commitment within your supply chain does not by itself change what is happening in the surrounding landscape. Many of those pressures come from forces no individual company controls.
A company can verify every plot in its supply chain and still source from a jurisdiction where net forest carbon is declining.
This isn't an excuse for inaction. The companies in that 4% are doing real work. But it does help explain why 63% of companies remain in the ‘late majority,’ with partial commitments and weak implementation. The issue is not only that verification infrastructure is lagging. It’s also that the unit of analysis, the individual company supply chain, does not match the unit of change, the landscape.
The parallel jurisdictional conversation
A parallel conversation is happening around landscapes, jurisdictions, and whether entire regions can become forest-positive.
The Earth Innovation Institute has been using Chloris biomass data at the state level in Brazil, and their findings point to something the supply chain conversation tends to miss.
One state, Goiás, has seen a net gain of 270 million tons of forest carbon over 25 years. How did that happen? Cattle production was intensified on a shrinking pasture area, fire was suppressed, and secondary forests recovered. The results made front-page news.
This is a real success story, but it falls largely outside the zero-deforestation supply chain paradigm and outside any individual company’s scorecard.
The measurement gap this reveals prevents two important conversations from connecting. Supply-chain strategies are designed to verify that individual sourcing is deforestation-free. Jurisdictional approaches ask whether entire states or provinces are reducing emissions and restoring forests overall. Both matter. But right now, a company could be sourcing "clean" from a jurisdiction that's still losing forest. And a jurisdiction could be making real progress that no supply chain initiative is designed to recognize.
Frameworks like the 4 Returns approach are built around this logic. Developed by Commonland, the Landscape Finance Lab, Wetlands International, and the IUCN CEM, they start from a different premise. A landscape has to generate four kinds of returns, social, natural, financial, and inspirational, over a time horizon of at least 20 years.
The Landscape Finance Lab spun out of WWF's jurisdictional REDD+ work. It focuses on structuring finance at a generational scale, not a project cycle. The Lab is direct about where things stand: the market for landscape-scale outcomes doesn't fully exist yet. But the business case is there, and the early models are working.
In Ireland, the Lab helped build a triple-crediting scheme for peatlands that bundles carbon, water, and biodiversity into a single payment system. It's now making payments. A small group of government officials, researchers, and practitioners built it without waiting for a framework to authorize it.
That kind of initiative falls completely outside corporate GHG accounting. And it's exactly the kind of initiative that needs to be visible and investable if landscape-scale action is going to scale.
The accounting standard has a real boundary problem
This points to a structural problem that does not get enough attention.
The GHG Protocol's Land Sector and Removals Standard is a major step forward. It brings land-use-change emissions and removals into corporate GHG inventories in a much more explicit and mandatory way. We published a detailed implementation framework for it earlier this year with SustainCERT. We believe in the standard.
But its accounting boundary creates a significant limitation.
The Standard is built around attribution within a company's own value chain. Scope 1 covers land you own or control. Scope 3 covers your suppliers. In both cases, the accounting boundary is the company's own footprint.
If a company invests in landscape-wide reforestation, funds collective agroforestry across a sourcing region, or contributes to a jurisdictional REDD+ program, those interventions do not show up in its corporate inventory. They are effectively ‘off-plot,’ and the Standard does not credit them.
The result is a real incentive problem. A company that spends millions on a jurisdictional program across a cocoa-growing region gets no accounting benefit. Meanwhile, a company that verifies only its own plots and ignores what is happening across the surrounding landscape can look better on paper.
The first company may be doing more for the landscape, while the second ends up with the cleaner-looking GHG inventory.
This isn't an argument against the Standard. It's an argument for using the Standard alongside other frameworks, rather than treating it as the only frame that matters. Groups like Wetlands International and the Accountability Framework Initiative are pushing for landscape-level GHG accounting. The idea is to bundle and verify activities across a jurisdiction as a collective effort. It's not a yet formal Protocol revision, but it is an active and important conversation.
Measurement is the bridge between these approaches
What connects the supply chain conversation and the landscape conversation is shared measurement. The same satellite-based biomass data that verifies a company's sourcing plots can also track forest carbon at the state level, year over year, going back 25 years.
That’s what Chloris has been building for.
We're providing biomass data for Brazilian states preparing jurisdictional REDD+ submissions. With SustainCERT, we published a technical framework mapping this data to the GHG Protocol's LSR Standard for corporate FLAG reporting. And we're working with EII to integrate Chloris data into the Green Jurisdictions database. The goal is to make forest-carbon trends visible alongside agricultural, governance, and social data.
The broader goal is to enable companies to say something new:
"Our sourcing is verified deforestation-free AND we source from a jurisdiction where forest carbon is increasing."
That claim means something different from either statement alone. It is the kind of claim that genuinely connects supply-chain accountability to landscape-scale progress.
What follows from this
Forest 500 matters. EUDR enforcement matters. So does the jurisdictional work being advanced by the Earth Innovation Institute , the GCF Task Force, the Accountability Framework Initiative, and the Landscape Finance Lab are pushing. What's missing is a shared measurement infrastructure that connects them.
If you are working on any part of this, I would be interested to hear what you are seeing. Whether your focus is corporate verification, jurisdictional REDD+, landscape finance, or agricultural portfolio risk. And if it would be useful to connect with people working on the other side of the same problem, I’m often happy to do that. In practice, that is half the job.
If you want to see what bundled landscape finance looks like in practice, the Landscape Finance Lab is worth studying. If you want to understand how measurement infrastructure maps to the GHG Protocol's new Land Sector and Removals Standard, our paper with SustainCERT is a useful place to start. And if you want to see jurisdictional carbon data for the tropics, EII's Green Jurisdictions database is a good place to begin.
