You can’t expect anything reasonable when Hollywood gets on its high horse, but really, are our pension contributions truly helping to strip the Amazon of its rainforests? That is the claim made in a short film featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, in which the actor appears in a sauna as ‘Benedict Lumberjack’, the CEO of a logging company. ‘The business of deforestation is on fire right now and it is all thanks to you,’ he says. ‘The money from your pension has helped scorch, slash and burn entire rainforests… some bits of the world are literally burning but it’s just the bits that no one cares about.’
Let’s sketch over the assertion that logging companies are setting fire to rainforests – emphasised in a shot of tall trees being consumed by fire. That would be an extraordinary way for a logging company to behave – why destroy the product that you are supposed to be exploiting? Logging companies might well burn the brash which is left over once the logs themselves have been carted off site, but to claim that they are simply set fire to the rainforest is bizarre.
Cumberbatch’s claim appears to be derived from a study by an organisation called Make My Money Matter, co-founded by the film director Richard Curtis. The study makes the claim that ‘in the UK alone, over £300 billion of pension fund investments are in companies and financial institutions with a high risk of driving deforestation’. It goes on to claim that ‘on an individual level, for every £10 you save, £2 is linked to companies and financial institutions with a high risk of deforestation’.
Logging may be big business for some, but is it really so vast that it comprises a fifth of the investments of UK pension funds? It is a preposterous figure, and only once you delve into the methodology published at the end of the report do you realise what is really going on. Make My Money Matter is totting up the value of every food company, every construction company and many others which cannot fully vouch for their supply chains. In other words, if you sell soya in some of your products you go down as an evil company driving deforestation unless you can account for every last ounce of soya that you consume and prove that it is not grown on deforested land. The problem with doing this is that no one except the largest companies, employing a massive ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) team, have the resources to do this.
The world is still undergoing net deforestation. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) the world lost 10 million hectares of forest per year between 2015 and 2020. However, the world also replanted forest equivalent to half of this, giving a net loss of around 5 million hectares. But is all of this evil? If you go back far enough isn’t most of our food is grown on land which was once forested. It does seem a bit unreasonable to berate tropic countries for clearing wooded areas for agriculture when, of course, we did the same centuries ago. Had we not done so, we wouldn’t have had much to eat.
At least farms on deforested land are producing something useful. The same can less easily be said of Hollywood films, the biggest of which, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance are responsible for 3,700 tonnes of carbon emissions – as much as a small town emits in a year. The largest slice comes from travel – in order words, flying mega stars like Cumberbatch around the world. Maybe before lecturing the rest of us, the film industry should get its own house in order.
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