Lowering environmental costs of oil‐palm expansion in Colombia

Abstract

Colombia is the fifth largest producer of palm oil in the world. The country's government and oil-palm farmers association target a sixfold increase of crude palm-oil production by 2020. We model the impacts of expanding oilpalm agriculture in Colombia through a spatially explicit scenario analysis. We demonstrate that the impacts of oil-palm expansion (e.g., deforestation, conversion of natural savannahs) would be minimized by establishing new plantations on pasture lands, given the low environmental value and economic utility, and the high agricultural potential of this land use. Impacts of oil-palm expansion on beef and dairy production could be compensated by improving productivity of pasture lands elsewhere. However, the profitability of oil-palm production in these areas might suffer over the long term due to high land purchase costs.

The Impacts of Oil Palm Agriculture on Colombia's Biodiversity: What We Know and Still Need to Know

“…Seven publications were related to environmental issues such as carbon and greenhouse gases, and eight papers focused on the socioeconomic aspects and history of oil palm development in Colombia. Only three papers were related to landscape planning or land-use change [34][35][36], and, notably, just three were related to biodiversity: one included birds, dung beetles, ants and herpetofauna [37], another snakes [38], and one was related to ants [39].…”

“…However, reliable data on how oil palm has expanded at the expense of natural ecosystems have been unavailable until 2012-2013 [34][35][36]. This lack of data can be attribute in part to the fact that oil palm development does not require an environmental license (except for the water concession and other issues related to industrial processes of mills), which has led to unregulated expansion [22].…”

“…However, a carbon conservation scenario would substantially reduce biomass carbon losses from the production-oriented scenario (87% decrease to 0.55 Mt), but it would also require twice as much land as the production-oriented scenario to reach the same production level. Garcia-Ulloa et al [35] suggest a hybrid scenario as the most environmental friendly approach, minimizing the impact of oil palm by using current cattle lands dominated by pastures, which have poor biodiversity values, low sustainability for long-term food production, and low biomass content. Geraldes et al [60] reached similar conclusions when analyzing 65 scenarios involving a combination of alternative land use and fertilizer application.…”

“…Garcia-Ulloa et al [35] used spatially explicit modeling at the national level to compare the possible impacts of oil palm expansion under different scenarios. They suggested that Colombia would require 730,000 ha of land to meet the target of 3.5 million metric tons (Mt) of crude palm oil by 2020.…”

Efecto de la estructura del cultivo de palma de aceite Elaeis guineensis (Arecaceae) sobre la diversidad de aves en un paisaje de la Orinoquía colombiana

“…La siembra de palma de aceite a escala industrial, ha generado impactos negativos en diversos componentes de la biodiversidad (Aratrakorn, Thunhikorn & Donald, 2006;Fitzherbert et al, 2008;Edwards et. al., 2010;García-Ulloa, Sloan, Pacheco, Ghazoul & Pin Koh, 2012), a través de la degradación de hábitat, destrucción y reemplazamiento de la vegetación nativa, que en el caso de la Orinoquía afecta a bosques húmedos, bosques secos, bosques de galería, pastizales y humedales (Blydenstein, 1967;Bolwing, Pomeroy, Tushabe & Mushabe, 2006;Pinzón, Pardi, Trejos & Midori, 2009), lo que genera cambios en la composición y estructura de la vegetación (Correa & Stevenson, 2010).…”