

Defending the EU’s Deforestation Regulation
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In late 2024, with the EU poised to adopt one of the world’s most ambitious anti-deforestation laws, powerful industry lobbies mounted an attack.
Behind closed doors, they pushed misleading claims of business opposition and tabled amendments that would gut the regulation.
Our task: stop them.
We could see that lobbyists were misleading EU policymakers into believing there was unanimous industry support for weakening the law. In reality, the reverse was true: many companies, from large food multinationals to independent timber SMEs, actually supported the law - not only because it safeguarded long-term supply chain resilience, but also because they had already invested heavily in compliance.
Our strategy was to bring these credible business voices into the public and political debate, challenge the illusion of industry consensus, and fracture the push for deregulation from within.
We began by reaching out to industry leaders to see if they would join the call to support the law, securing public support from several large businesses including Nestlé and Ferrero. Our media strategy targeted top-tier media known to shape policymaker thinking like the Financial Times and Politico. This coverage disrupted the illusion of industry consensus in favour of deregulation.
The law survived intact. None of the damaging amendments passed. Our intervention disrupted the political consensus, split voting blocs in the European Parliament, and influenced national governments, who ultimately blocked the amendments at Council.