Accounting for trade in by-products in estimating the role of the European Union in driving deforestation

The article discusses how governments seek to ensure that products consumed in their countries meet certain sustainability standards, even though production locations are often distant from consumption sites Physical trade models help estimate the link between consumption and production impacts for individual products, but they often overlook the trade of derivative products, which can bias sustainability risk assessments To mitigate this bias, the article presents an approach for assessing the importance of considering the trade of derivative products when attributing impacts, applying it to rubber and bovine leather trade and their relationship with deforestation, within the context of the European Union's regulation on deforestation-free products.