The Climate-Ecology Blueprint challenges the current economic paradigm of GDP measures of growth and consumerism, which promotes supply chains with unsustainable extractivism, pollution and waste. It provides a set of criteria that guards against climate and ecological injustice and greenwashing. It also has a measurable target to increase the health, abundance, diversity and resilience of nature by 2030 against a 2020 baseline.
To exemplify the importance of policy in Global North countries guiding against environmental destruction at different stages of the supply chain we can turn to chocolate: arguably, one of the most ubiquitously delicious, gustatory sensations known to humanity.
Cacao is a fruit, and its precious seeds are imbued with nutritional, spiritual, culinary and aesthetic qualities – all of which bestow cacao, and, in its processed form – cocoa – worthy of a high-value food commodity. In the European market alone, the cocoa beans market is estimated at USD 23.39 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach USD 27.92 billion by 2030.
The first documentary evidence that cocoa beans and chocolate had been presented to a European court was dated 1544. Yet this nutritionally substantive and culturally life-affirming crop had been cultivated already during the mid-Holocene period, roughly 3300 BCE, by the Mayo-Chinchipe people.
Despite the commodity’s invoking such simple benignity, its supply chain is complex and arguably fraught with ethical pitfalls driven by a profit margin. In the Amazon, our taste for chocolate drives deforestation.
In Peru, cacao companies are the main benefactors of the controversial Forest Law. Following the implementation of a Forest Law at the end of 2023, the Amazon forest in Peru is being cut down at a fast pace. The law was officially justified as a measure to circumvent EU deforestation regulation banning the import of illegally produced forest goods. By legalising logging, small farmers are said to get their products to the EU.
The Peruvian Amazon is the second largest expanse of the Amazon, after the Brazilian. It is particularly critical in the worldwide fight against climate change since it contains nearly 49 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalents, making it one of our planet’s most important carbon repositories.
We ask you to imagine if you were members of the Blueprint Citizens’ Assembly in deliberating on addressing the need for an eco-socio-economic justice supply chain transformation, how would you create respective recommendations to contribute to a hypothetical Blueprint strategy?
Stipulations / principles to which the climate-nature emergency ‘strategy’ must adhere include –
‘To take every possible step to avoid, -and where avoidance is not possible, limit—and where limiting is not possible under only exceptional circumstances—restore and compensate for – the adverse impacts on ecosystems and human rights due to –
i) the country’s generated cycles of production and consumption of goods and services,
ii) related to trade, transport and financing,
iii) and including, but not limited to, impacts from planned obsolescence, the extraction of raw materials, deforestation, land and water degradation, pollution and waste production.’