Tell Governor Hochul to protect global rainforests!

New Yorkers have a unique chance to fight destruction of some of the world’s most critical ecosystems. But the window of opportunity is closing.

The TREES Act will create a real incentive for companies to engage in ethical business and halt deforestation practices. But we need YOUR help to ensure it passes.

Governor Hochul could make her decision on whether or not to sign this bill into law at any point. Meanwhile, more forests are being destroyed. That’s why your signature is SO URGENT.

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Dear Governor Hochul,

As your constituent, I am writing to ask you to sign the Tropical Rainforest Economic & Environmental Sustainability (TREES) Act.

This bill will put New York State at the forefront of global efforts to end the crisis of deforestation in tropical regions by ensuring that entities contracting to provide goods or services to our state government do not drive deforestation through their supply chains.

An estimated 18 million acres of forest, an area half the size of New York State, is lost every year due to human activities. Tropical forests cover roughly seven percent of the Earth’s surface but harbor close to 50 percent of all species on Earth, and tropical deforestation is the third leading driver of global CO2 emissions.

Public procurement is one of the largest levers we have for mitigating and reversing climate change. As the 10th largest economy in the world, our state’s purchasing power has significant market influence. For decades, New York has been successfully implementing common-sense procurement reforms, from labor protections to buying cleaner vehicles. The NY TREES Act will ensure that government procurement does not drive tropical deforestation, tropical primary forest degradation, or associated abuses of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Similar legislative efforts are occurring in jurisdictions worldwide, including deforestation-free regulations recently enacted in the European Union.

The bill is business friendly as well: it gives a bidding preference to small, medium-sized, and minority-and-women-owned businesses and creates a supply chain transparency assistance program to support these enterprises to achieve ethical supply chains for forest-risk products.

New York has been a leader in environmental stewardship and the fight against climate change, a fight we cannot win without addressing the impacts of deforestation. The TREES Act will extend New York State’s leadership to include the protection of global forests and send a crucial signal to the market that destructive, commodity-driven deforestation needs to stop. I respectfully urge you to sign the TREES Act into law.

Thank you for representing my views.

Sincerely,

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