Palm oil is the most widely traded vegetable fat globally, with demand projected to increase substantially in the future. Because almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical moist forests, expansion of oil palm agriculture threatens biodiversity and increases greenhouse gas emissions. We aim to guide efforts to reduce tropical deforestation due to oil palm by analyzing recent expansion and modeling potential future ones. We analyze sample oil palm plantations in 20 countries to find where oil palm has replaced forests from 1989-2013. We then compared the deforestation trends to countrywide trends in FAO data for oil palm planted area. Finally we assessed which forests are vulnerable to deforestation for oil palm in the future and identified critical areas for biodiversity that oil palm expansion threatens.
Results/Conclusions
Our analysis reveals regional trends in deforestation associated with oil palm agriculture. In Southeast Asia, 45% of sampled oil palm plantations came from areas that were forests in or after 1989. For South America, the comparable figure was 31%. By contrast, in Mesoamerica and Africa, we observed only 2% and 7% of oil palm plantations coming from areas that were forest in 1989. The largest areas of vulnerable forest are in Africa and South America. Vulnerable forests in all four regions of production contain globally high concentrations of mammal and bird species at risk of extinction. However, priority areas for biodiversity conservation differ based on taxa and criteria used. Government regulation and voluntary market interventions can help promote the expansion of oil palm plantations in ways that protect biodiversity-rich ecosystems.