Annual oil palm plantation maps in Malaysia and Indonesia from 2001 to 2016

Xu, Yidi; Yu, Le; Li, Wei; Ciais, Philippe; Cheng, Yuqi; Gong, Peng

doi:10.5194/essd-12-847-2020

Cited by 68 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Consistent maps of the distribution of oil crops over time, to our knowledge currently available only for oil palm grown in Indonesia and Malaysia [84], would be a valuable resource to be combined with datasets of environmental footprints. Such data would allow identifying temporal trends in the impacts of different crops, monitoring progress in reducing them, and holding producer countries to commitments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species Richness and Carbon Footprints of Vegetable Oils: Can High Yields Outweigh Palm Oil’s Environmental Impact?

Beyer

Rademacher

2021

Sustainability

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Palm oil has been widely criticised for its high environmental impacts, leading to calls to replace it with alternative vegetable oils in food and cosmetic products. However, substituting palm oil would be environmentally beneficial only if the environmental footprint per litre oil were lower than those of alternative vegetable oils. Whether this is the case is not obvious, given the high oil yields of oil palm of up to 10 times those of alternative crops. Here, we combine global agricultural and environmental datasets to show that, among the world’s seven major vegetable oil crops (oil palm, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, groundnut, coconut, olive), oil palm has the lowest average species richness and carbon footprint associated with an annual production of one litre of vegetable oil. For each crop, these yield-adjusted footprints differ substantially between major producer countries, which we find to be largely the result of differences in crop management. Closing agricultural yield gaps of oil crops through improved management practices would significantly reduce the environmental footprints per oil yield. This would minimise the need for further land conversion to oil cropland and indeed could increase production to such an extent that a significant area of oil croplands could be ecologically restored.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species Richness and Carbon Footprints of Vegetable Oils: Can High Yields Outweigh Palm Oil’s Environmental Impact?

Beyer

Rademacher

2021

Sustainability

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“…Modern commercial OP cultivation began in Malaysia in 1917 (32) and over 88% of palm oil is still produced by Malaysia and the two neighbouring SE Asian countries of Indonesia and Thailand (11). From 2001 to 2016 the expansion of OP plantations was particularly marked in this region with a 2.5-fold increase in Malaysia and a 4.2-fold increase in Indonesia (33) . Over the past decade, OP crops have also been grown increasingly outside SE Asia (20), as suitable land in Asia is becoming scarce and the changing climate is less conducive to cultivation.…”

Section: Structure Of the Oil Palm Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Oil Palm in the 2020s and Beyond: Challenges and Solutions

Murphy¹,

Goggin²,

Paterson³

2020

Preprint

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Background Oil palm (OP), Elaeis guineensis , is by far the most important global oil crop, supplying about 40% of total traded vegetable oil. Palm oils are key dietary components consumed daily by over three billion people, mostly in Asia, and also have a wide range of important non-food uses including in cleansing and sanitising products. Main body Oil palm is a perennial crop with a >25-year life cycle and an exceptionally small land footprint compared to annual oilseed crops. Oil palm crops globally produce an annual 81 million tonnes (Mt) of oil from about 19 million hectares (Mha). In contrast, the second and third largest vegetable oil crops, soybean and rapeseed, yield a combined 84 Mt oil but occupy over 163 Mha of increasingly scarce arable land. Despite this advantage, oil palm has acquired a poor environmental reputation, especially in Europe and North America, although soybean planting is now responsible for more deforestation. Oil palm crops face other challenges in the 2020s. On the demand side, these include changing consumer purchasing habits, threats to global trade systems, and diminishing demand for liquid fuels as transport systems become increasingly electrified. On the supply side, major issues include stagnant yields in ageing plantations, sluggish replanting of improved varieties, labour shortages, diseases and climatic/ environmental threats. The latter include the increasing incidence of new and existing pests/diseases and a general lack of climatic resilience, especially relating to elevated temperatures and increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. This review surveys the oil palm sector in the 2020s and beyond, its major challenges and options for future progress. Conclusions Oil palm crops face many future challenges, including emerging threats from climate change and new pests and diseases, that require more effective international collaboration. Nevertheless, new breeding technologies are providing the promise of improvements, such as much higher yielding varieties, improved oil profiles, enhanced disease resistance and modified crop architecture to enable harvesting mechanisation. The industry also needs to redouble its efforts to engage with global consumers in a constructive dialogue aimed at addressing its image problem and explaining the many benefits of its products.

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“…The newly developed ORCHIDEE-MICT-OP can be a useful tool to predict future oil palm yields, simulate LUC carbon emissions and estimate impact on ecosystem services. Malaysia and Indonesia experienced the highest oil palm expansion (3.8 and 9.7 million ha) over the world from 2001 to 2016 (Xu et al, 2020).The drainage and replacement of peatland (3.1×10 6 ha, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2020-252 Preprint. Discussion started: 22 October 2020 c Author(s) 2020.…”

Section: Implication and Application Of Orchidee-mict-opmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It provides 39% of the global supply of vegetable oil and occupies 7% of the agricultural land devoted to oil-producing plants (Caliman, 2011;Rival and Levang, 2014). With the increasing demand for palm oil as a biofuel and a feedstock for industrial products, oil palm plantation continuously expanded from 5.59 to 19.50 million ha during 2001-2016 in the world's top two palm oil producers, Malaysia and Indonesia (Xu et al, 2020). This rapid expansion brought about high ecological and social costs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Oil palm modelling in the global land-surface model ORCHIDEE-MICT

Xu¹,

Ciais²,

Yu³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Oil palm is the most productive oil crop that provides ~40 % of the global vegetable oil supply, with 7 % of the cultivated land devoted to oil plants. The rapid expansion of oil palm cultivation is seen as one of the major cause for deforestation emissions and threatens the conservation of rain forest and swamp areas and their associated ecosystem services in tropical areas. Given the importance of oil palm in oil production and its adverse environmental consequences, it is important to understand the physiological and phenological processes of oil palm and its impacts on the carbon, water and energy cycles. In most global vegetation models, oil palm is represented by generic plant functional types (PFT) without specific representation of its morphological, physical and physiological traits. This would cause biases in the subsequent simulations. In this study, we introduced a new specific PFT for oil palm in the global land surface model ORCHIDEE-MICT (v8.4.2). The specific morphology, phenology and harvest process of oil palm were implemented, and the plant carbon allocation scheme was modified to support the growth of branch, leaf and fruit component of each phytomer. A new age-specific parameterization scheme for photosynthesis, autotrophic respiration, and carbon allocation was also developed for the oil palm PFT, based on observed physiology, and was calibrated by observations. The improved model generally reproduces the leaf area index, biomass density and fruit yield during the life cycle at 14 observation sites. Photosynthesis, carbon allocation and biomass components for oil palm also agree well with observations. This explicit representation of oil palm in global land surface model offers a useful tool for understanding the ecological processes of oil palm growth and assessing the environmental impacts of oil palm plantations.

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Annual oil palm plantation maps in Malaysia and Indonesia from 2001 to 2016

Cited by 68 publications

References 75 publications

Species Richness and Carbon Footprints of Vegetable Oils: Can High Yields Outweigh Palm Oil’s Environmental Impact?

Species Richness and Carbon Footprints of Vegetable Oils: Can High Yields Outweigh Palm Oil’s Environmental Impact?

Oil Palm in the 2020s and Beyond: Challenges and Solutions

Oil palm modelling in the global land-surface model ORCHIDEE-MICT

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