Category: journals

Tropical and subtropical forests face severe threat of loss and degradation from commodities linked to agricultural expansion and forestry. This not only drives negative impacts like greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss but also impacts local communities. Global consumers are connected to this distant forest loss through complex value chains where commodities are harvested, processed, transported and sold.

To bridge this gap, the EU adopted the EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR) in 2023 with implementation set for 30 December 2026. The regulation aims to guarantee that the products EU citizens consume do not contribute to global forest loss. It covers seven commodities: cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood, and products that contain, have been fed with or have been made using these.

Under the EUDR, any business placing these commodities on the EU market, or exporting from it, must prove that they do not originate from recently deforested land. While the EUDR directly applies to EU businesses, it essentially regulates businesses globally who want to sell to the EU market. These must, for example, provide geolocations of the plots where products were grown/harvested and evidence of legality.

Understanding why and how businesses across the globe respond to environmental regulations like the EUDR is a key question for their successful uptake.

A new study with CBA co-author Yitagesu Tekle Tegegne explores this in Brazil, the Congo Basin, and the EU, covering both forestry and agricultural sectors. Based on 200 interviews across the value chains, a clear pattern emerges: market considerations drive everything.

While regulative pressure matters – particularly for EU-based businesses –  ethical or legal concerns are almost always filtered through a financial lens before they influence decisions.

If it is too costly or complicated, smaller suppliers are likely to abandon the EU market and just sell elsewhere instead. Some larger businesses plan to separate EUDR-conforming from non-conforming supply rather than changing their practices, which means deforestation-linked goods simply flow to other markets with no net environmental benefit.

The study highlights that for regulation to drive real change rather than just “paper compliance”, policymakers must move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. Different businesses – from massive multinationals to small local farmers – experience these rules in vastly different ways. Ultimately, the authors argue that if a regulation is going to drive real change, market forces should be complemented with strong deterrence, coordination with other regions and markets to prevent leakages, supportive incentives and a sense among businesses that the rules are fair and legitimate.

Cramm, M., Ziegert, R. F., Berning, L., Uwiringiyimana, H., Schulz, D., Shidiki, A., Zanguim, H., Wunder, S., Börner, J., Azevedo‐Ramos, C., Tegegne, Y. T., & Sotirov, M. (2026). Chain reactions: how businesses plan to respond to the EU Deforestation Regulation in Brazil, the Congo Basin, and Europe. Regulation & Governance, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70156

Image: Adobe Stock / whitcomberd

Stopping global warming is essential if we want to achieve sustainability and meet the Paris Agreement goals. However, the global economy will need to decarbonise at least five times faster than it is currently doing, to limit global warming to “well below 2 °C”.

Positive ‘tipping points’ where low-carbon transitions become self-propelling could be key to ensuring this acceleration and making it hard to reverse. These tipping points don’t just happen in sectors like energy or transport, but also in nature and regeneration.

But how can we credibly identify them? A new scientific paper sets out a methodology for identifying potential positive tipping points, the factors that can influence them, and the actions to trigger them.

The framework proposed in the paper offers a simple but powerful process:

1. Map the system – who are the key actors? What are the feedback loops?
2. Look for leverage – what factors (eg cost, access or social acceptance) are holding change back, or could speed it up?
3. Trigger strategically – introduce targeted actions (eg pilot projects) that shift behaviours and start reinforcing feedback.

The framework asks a series of questions, which can be applied to a system of interest – for example a sector of the economy responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions like transport, or a sector in a particular country or city. This can also be applied in nature-based sectors too, such as food, agriculture, fisheries and land use.

Lenton et al, 2025

Is there potential for a positive tipping point?

• Is there evidence that this system or an analogous system has tipped in the past or elsewhere?
• Are there reinforcing feedbacks in this system that could become strong enough to overwhelm balancing feedbacks and support self-propelling change? 

Can the nature and/or proximity of a tipping point be quantified?

• Are there continuous data that describe the overall behaviour of the system in time? 
• Are there process-specific data that can quantify causal interactions, learning rates, and feedback loops? 

Can the factors that most affect the tipping point be identified?

• What do models reveal? Are detailed case studies available?

Can actions that bring forward the tipping point be identified?

The paper invites researchers to help refine this methodology further, and sets out suggestions for further work to improve it and make it more applicable.

More information

Lenton, T.M., Powell, T.W.R., Smith, S.R. et al. A method to identify positive tipping points to accelerate low-carbon transitions and actions to trigger them. Sustain Sci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01704-9

The CBA’s Chief Programmes Officer Talia Smith is a co-author.

Photo: Patricio Gaibor, Unsplash

There is growing concern around the environmental impacts of cotton fibre production, including high water consumption, high synthetic inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, as well as soil degradation, loss of biodiversity and water pollution. Regenerative and agroforesty-based cotton production has emerged as a sustainable nature-based solution to overcome environmental and socioeconomic challenges. However, knowledge on and uptake of regenerative practices is often limited and fragmented.

New research from the CBA in collaboration with Affiliate Members EFI and Pretaterra, as well as CREA shows cotton-based agroforestry production systems could be a potential entry point for regenerative practices in the Mediterranean region and beyond.

Agroforestry (integrating trees with crops and/or livestock) in the Mediterranean dates to the Neolithic period, with a variety of trees and management systems used since. The most common agroforestry systems today are olive cultivation with understorey grazing by goats and sheep.

However, agroforestry could be one of the main options to overcome land scarcity and integrate cotton in the Mediterranean region. Adding trees to cotton would provide multipurpose products (food, fodder, fuelwood and timber) and diversify incomes, as well as the trees providing ecological benefits for understory crops. There are several potential trees which could be integrated with cotton in agroforestry systems in the Mediterranean such as poplar, olive, oak, chestnut, carob, apple, peach, almond and date trees.

What regenerative practices could be used?

Regenerative soil management practices in cotton production include zero or minimum tillage, and the use of cover crops, mulches and green manures to improve soil fertility, conserve water, increase yields, reduce emissions and enhance biodiversity. Cover crops are also used to suppress weeds, alongside weed management practices such as rotation with legume crops, appropriate sowing timing and plant spacing.

What would be the benefits?

Making the conventional cotton production sector regenerative could reduce the negative environmental footprint, promote the resilience of farming systems to climate extremes and increase economic profitability with product diversification. It would also improve soil health, reduce chemical inputs, increase biodiversity and enhance the quality and quantity of water available, as well as enhancing carbon sequestration.

What are the challenges?

Challenges such as scalability, knowledge transfer, and farmer adoption limit the widespread use of regenerative practices. Supportive policies, education and stakeholder collaboration are needed to aid implementation and dissemination of practices.

More information

Negash, M., Tegegne, Y.T., Palahi, M. et al. Overview of regenerative and agroforestry-based cotton systems in the Mediterranean and beyond: a review. Agroforest Syst 99, 117 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-025-01207-7

Plants and agricultural systems in the Mediterranean region face significant challenges from climate change and extreme weather events like drought. Although cotton is generally considered a drought-resistant crop, continuous water stress can affect the yield and fibre quality. It’s important therefore to be able to rapidly monitor the plant’s water status, to enable irrigation to be scheduled at the right time and avoid damage and losses.

New non-invasive methods of monitoring have been explored within the Apulia Regenerative Cotton Project. This Living Lab 1.0 is supported by the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance in collaboration with the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Fashion Task Force, coordinated by the European Forest Institute (EFI) together with the Council for Agricultural Research and Economics of Italy (CREA) and PRETATERRA. The experimental agroforestry regenerative cotton site in Rutigliano, southern Italy is testing and scientifically assessing new ways to implement sustainable cotton production in Italy. 

Traditional methods for assessing cotton’s water status include measurements of soil moisture, water potential in the leaves and in the stem (the most stable and reliable indicator). However, the measurement of stem water potential involves enclosing a leaf in a foil bag and using a pressure chamber. This is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process using specialised equipment, which limits its practicality for large-scale or frequent monitoring.

In 2023, remote sensing and machine learning (AI) techniques were tested to see if they could help. Remote sensing technology measures the radiation reflected or emitted from objects, without direct physical contact. Satellites, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles are used to collect the data. Researchers working on the Apulia project used data from Sentinel-2 – two satellites from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus programme which provide high-resolution multispectral images. That data was then analysed using machine learning to identify patterns in the data, allowing predictions to be made.

Previous studies have investigated the use of remote sensing data to see the water status for cotton, for example using drones. However, this is the first time remote sensing data from satellites has been integrated with machine learning techniques, especially in the Mediterranean area. Different machine learning algorithms were tested and compared, to see which performed best at estimating the cotton plants’ water status, with the ‘random forest’ (RF) model coming out on top.

This approach demonstrates how high-frequency, non-invasive monitoring of cotton’s water status could help support smart irrigation strategies, improving water use efficiency in Mediterranean cotton production.

More information

Garofalo, S.P.; Modugno, A.F.; De Carolis, G.; Sanitate, N.; Negash Tesemma, M.; Scarascia-Mugnozza, G.; Tekle Tegegne, Y.; Campi, P. Explainable Artificial Intelligence to Predict the Water Status of Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L., 1763) from Sentinel-2 Images in the Mediterranean Area. Plants 2024, 13, 3325. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants13233325