Oil palm and biodiversity: a situation analysis by the IUCN Oil Palm Task Force

doi:10.2305/iucn.ch.2018.11.en

Cited by 101 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 147 publications

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“…Palm oil production is a driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions (Fitzherbert et al 2008, Carlson et al 2013, Guillaume et al 2018. The negative environmental impacts associated with palm oil production have primarily occurred in Malaysia and Indonesia where approximately 84% of the world's palm oil is produced (United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peeling back the label—exploring sustainable palm oil ecolabelling and consumption in the United Kingdom

Ostfeld

Howarth

Reiner

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Palm oil production has been linked to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. We explore consumer awareness of palm oil, perceptions of its environmental impact, recognition of ecolabels including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) ecolabel, and inclusion or avoidance of ecolabels in household shopping using a representative sample of the British population. We find consumer awareness of palm oil to be fairly high (77%), with 41% of those aware of palm oil perceiving it as 'environmentally unfriendly', more than double the level of any other vegetable oil examined. However, recognition of the RSPO ecolabel is the same as those who 'recognize' a fictitious ecolabel, making recognition indistinguishable from zero. Based on our logistic regression analysis, members of the British population most likely to actively include ecolabelled products in their weekly household shopping are those who are female, from higher socioeconomic groups, spend more than £120 per week on household shopping, and have received a Bachelors degree or higher. Despite clear benefits of environmental certification and ecolabelling, a relatively niche segment of the general population actively includes ecolabelled products in their weekly household shopping. Therefore, we recommend current policies be amended to require companies to source 100% identity preserved certified palm oil that can be traced to the plantation level to avoid having to rely on consumer decisions to enable a shift towards more responsibly-sourced palm oil. Additionally, requiring multinational companies to map and publicly disclose full supply chain information for all global operations, including palm oil suppliers and concessions, could help illuminate and discourage unsustainable practices.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peeling back the label—exploring sustainable palm oil ecolabelling and consumption in the United Kingdom

Ostfeld

Howarth

Reiner

et al. 2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…As a result, few lowland forests outside of public protected areas remain (Curran et al, 2004). Given the projected growth in palm oil demand (Carrasco, Larrosa, & Edwards, 2014) and governments' interests in the palm oil industry as a vehicle for economic growth (Sayer, Ghazoul, Nelson, & Boedhihartono, 2012), as well as the substantial negative effects of oil palm agriculture on biodiversity (Meijaard et al, 2018), strategies are needed to reduce biodiversity losses in oil palm landscapes (Lucey et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the benefits of conservation set‐asides for improved habitat connectivity in tropical agricultural landscapes

Scriven

Carlson

Hodgson

et al. 2019

Journal of Applied Ecology

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Habitat connectivity is important for tropical biodiversity conservation. Expansion of commodity crops, such as oil palm, fragments natural habitat areas, and strategies are needed to improve habitat connectivity in agricultural landscapes. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) voluntary certification system requires that growers identify and conserve forest patches identified as High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs) before oil palm plantations can be certified as sustainable. We assessed the potential benefits of these conservation set‐asides for forest connectivity.We mapped HCVAs and quantified their forest cover in 2015. To assess their contribution to forest connectivity, we modelled range expansion of forest‐dependent populations with five dispersal abilities spanning those representative of poor dispersers (e.g. flightless insects) to more mobile species (e.g. large birds or bats) across 70 plantation landscapes in Borneo.Because only 21% of HCVA area was forested in 2015, these conservation set‐asides currently provide few connectivity benefits. Compared to a scenario where HCVAs contain no forest (i.e. a no‐RSPO scenario), current HCVAs improved connectivity by ~3% across all dispersal abilities. However, if HCVAs were fully reforested, then overall landscape connectivity could improve by ~16%. Reforestation of HCVAs had the greatest benefit for poor to intermediate dispersers (0.5–3 km per generation), generating landscapes that were up to 2.7 times better connected than landscapes without HCVAs. By contrast, connectivity benefits of HCVAs were low for highly mobile populations under current and reforestation scenarios, because range expansion of these populations was generally successful regardless of the amount of forest cover. Synthesis and applications. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) requires that High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs) be set aside to conserve biodiversity, but HCVAs currently provide few connectivity benefits because they contain relatively little forest. However, reforested HCVAs have the potential to improve landscape connectivity for some forest species (e.g. winged insects), and we recommend active management by plantation companies to improve forest quality of degraded HCVAs (e.g. by enrichment planting). Future revisions to the RSPO's Principles and Criteria should also ensure that large (i.e. with a core area >2 km2) HCVAs are reconnected to continuous tracts of forest to maximize their connectivity benefits.

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“…Given the demand for vegetable oils (Byerlee et al, 2017), a call for reductions in palm oil production will require an increase in other, higher latitude, oil crops (e.g., soy, maize, sunflower, and rapeseed) (Carrasco et al, 2014;Meijaard et al, 2018). The largest areas allocated for the production of vegetable oils are in the USA, China, and Brazil (Figure 2), although the predominant crops there, maize and soy beans, also produce non-oil products.…”

Section: Tropical Vs Temperatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, human-wildlife conflict often increases following the establishment of largescale plantations, with species like orangutans and tigers being displaced when forests are cleared, causing conflict with people, and concurrent harm to animals. Other indirect environmental impacts of oil palm include greenhouse gas emissions related to deforestation and peat decomposition and the additional influences of land-cover change on local climates and hydrology, the use of fire in land clearing and resulting smoke-haze, fertilizer, and pesticide usage and runoff, downstream water quality and freshwater species diversity, spill over effects (e.g., from high densities of rats), invasive species, and modified access for hunters, farmers and others (Dislich et al, 2017;Meijaard et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%