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  • Review Article
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The environmental impacts of palm oil in context

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 1418–1426 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires balancing demands on land between agriculture (SDG 2) and biodiversity (SDG 15). The production of vegetable oils and, in particular, palm oil, illustrates these competing demands and trade-offs. Palm oil accounts for ~40% of the current global annual demand for vegetable oil as food, animal feed and fuel (210 Mt), but planted oil palm covers less than 5–5.5% of the total global oil crop area (approximately 425 Mha) due to oil palm’s relatively high yields. Recent oil palm expansion in forested regions of Borneo, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, where >90% of global palm oil is produced, has led to substantial concern around oil palm’s role in deforestation. Oil palm expansion’s direct contribution to regional tropical deforestation varies widely, ranging from an estimated 3% in West Africa to 50% in Malaysian Borneo. Oil palm is also implicated in peatland draining and burning in Southeast Asia. Documented negative environmental impacts from such expansion include biodiversity declines, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. However, oil palm generally produces more oil per area than other oil crops, is often economically viable in sites unsuitable for most other crops and generates considerable wealth for at least some actors. Global demand for vegetable oils is projected to increase by 46% by 2050. Meeting this demand through additional expansion of oil palm versus other vegetable oil crops will lead to substantial differential effects on biodiversity, food security, climate change, land degradation and livelihoods. Our Review highlights that although substantial gaps remain in our understanding of the relationship between the environmental, socio-cultural and economic impacts of oil palm, and the scope, stringency and effectiveness of initiatives to address these, there has been little research into the impacts and trade-offs of other vegetable oil crops. Greater research attention needs to be given to investigating the impacts of palm oil production compared to alternatives for the trade-offs to be assessed at a global scale.

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Fig. 1: Main vegetable oil crops.
Fig. 2: Maps of industrial and smallholder-scale oil palm from analysis of satellite imagery until the second half of 2019 (ref. 14), and examples of species it affects negatively.
Fig. 3: Oil palm’s estimated role in deforestation aggregated across studies, years and regions.
Fig. 4: Species groups with more than eight threatened species with the terms ‘palm oil’ or ‘oil palm’ in the threats texts of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species Assessments26.

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Acknowledgements

The development of this situation analysis was supported by the IUCN project ‘Global Commons: Solutions for a Crowded Planet’, funded by the Global Environment Facility. D.J.B. received funding from the UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund under the Trade, Development and the Environment Hub project (project number ES/S008160/1). M.P. was supported by the CNPq research productivity fellowships (no. 308403/2017‐7). J.G.-U. was funded by SNSF R4D-project Oil Palm Adaptive Landscapes.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Borneo Futures, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

    Erik Meijaard, Truly Santika & Marc Ancrenaz

  2. Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Erik Meijaard, Truly Santika, Diego Juffe-Bignoli & Matthew J. Struebig

  3. School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Erik Meijaard

  4. Science and Knowledge Unit, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland

    Thomas M. Brooks & Nicholas Macfarlane

  5. World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), University of The Philippines Los Baños, Laguna, The Philippines

    Thomas M. Brooks

  6. Institute for Marine & Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Thomas M. Brooks

  7. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Hawai’i Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Kimberly M. Carlson

  8. Department of Environmental Studies, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Kimberly M. Carlson

  9. Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Eleanor M. Slade & Janice Ser Huay Lee

  10. Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    John Garcia-Ulloa

  11. Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia

    David L. A. Gaveau & Daniel Murdiyarso

  12. UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), Cambridge, UK

    Diego Juffe-Bignoli

  13. School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

    Serge A. Wich

  14. Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Serge A. Wich

  15. Kinabatangan Orang-Utan Conservation Programme, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

    Marc Ancrenaz

  16. Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Lian Pin Koh

  17. Rainforest Alliance, Washington, D.C., USA

    Nadine Zamira

  18. Department of Ecological Dynamics, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany

    Jesse F. Abrams

  19. Global Systems Institute and Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Jesse F. Abrams

  20. Animal Sciences Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Herbert H. T. Prins

  21. Programme and Policy Group, IUCN, Gland, Switzerland

    Cyriaque N. Sendashonga

  22. Department of Geophysics and Meteorology, IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia

    Daniel Murdiyarso

  23. Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Paul R. Furumo

  24. Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Rachel Hoffmann

  25. Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Brazil

    Marcos Persio

  26. Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain

    Adrià Descals

  27. European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy

    Zoltan Szantoi

  28. Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Zoltan Szantoi

  29. Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway

    Douglas Sheil

Authors
  1. Erik Meijaard
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  2. Thomas M. Brooks
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  3. Kimberly M. Carlson
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  4. Eleanor M. Slade
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  8. Truly Santika
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  21. Rachel Hoffmann
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  22. Marcos Persio
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Contributions

E.M., D.S. and T.M.B. conceptualized this study and developed the initial manuscript. K.C., J.G.-U., D.G., J.S.H.L., D.J.B., S.A.W., M.A., S.W., L.P.K., J.F.A., Z.S. and A.D. assisted in the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of the data, and further writing. E.S., T.S., J.F.A., H.P., C.S., D.M., P.F., N.M., R.H., M.P. and M.S. provided substantial input into the text revisions, and N.Z., J.F.A., D.J.B., K.C., D.G., A.D. and J.F.A. designed the graphics.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erik Meijaard.

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Competing interests

None of co-authors in this study, except D.J.B., M.P. and J.G.-U., received funding for conducting this Review, although the information was partly based on a study funded by the Global Environment Facility. E.M., T.M.B., D.G., M.A., S.W., L.P.K., J.G.-U., K.C., N.M. and D.S. are members of and have received funding from the IUCN Oil Palm Task Force, a group tasked by the IUCN members to investigate the sustainability of palm oil. T.M.B., D.J.B., M.A., C.S. and N.M. work for conservation organizations and E.M., M.A. and M.P. have done work paid by palm oil companies or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

Additional information

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary materials, Figs. 1 and 2, and Tables 1–3.

Supplementary Table

List of species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species for which oil crops are one of the threats to the survival (1 = impacted by the crop; 0 = not impacted by the crop).

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Meijaard, E., Brooks, T.M., Carlson, K.M. et al. The environmental impacts of palm oil in context. Nat. Plants 6, 1418–1426 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00813-w

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