No such thing as sustainable palm oil – 'certified' can destroy even more wildlife, say scientists | The Independent
Palm-oil forests certified as sustainable are being destroyed faster than non-certified land, experts have found, in a study they say blows the lid on any claims that the oil can be destruction-free.
Plantations with eco-friendly endorsements have lost 38 per cent of their forest cover since 2007, while non-certified areas have lost 34 per cent, according to researchers from Purdue University in the US state of Indiana.
The use of sustainability labels had allowed for even greater expansions of plantations that are driving orangutans towards extinction in southeast Asia and destroying natural carbon-absorbing rainforests, they said.
They drew their conclusions after 15 years of fact-finding missions, using data from these missions as well as from satellite, governmental, charities and palm oil companies’ own reports, analysing 2,210 “concessions” – licensed palm-growing areas.
From 2001 to 2016, total tree loss in Indonesian palm oil concessions was equivalent to 34.2 per cent of the area covered by the plantations but the loss in certified sustainable plantations was higher – 38.3 per cent.
The study’s lead author, Roberto Gatti, told The Independent: “The implication is that there is no reason for companies to claim sustainable palm oil and to use labels for certified products because, in terms of deforestation, there is no significant difference between a certified and a non-certified palm oil plantation. Both need (or needed in the recent past) the complete removal of the original tropical forest.”
Based on forest loss trends, if governments do not act immediately and end acceptance of certification schemes, the world will almost completely lose southeast Asian forests in a few decades, he warned.
“Our research shows quite unequivocally that, unfortunately, there is no way to produce sustainable palm oil that did not come from deforestation, and that the claims by corporations, certification schemes and non government organisations are simply ‘greenwashing’, useful to continue business as usual,” he added. “No shortcuts: if you use palm oil, certified or not, you are definitely destroying tropical forests.
“Every tropical tree, which is part of a complex tropical forest, harbours thousands of other species – insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians, birds, monkeys, primates such as orangutans, ferns, mosses – and every time a tropical tree is cut to make room for a plantation a whole community, often including very rare species, may disappear.
According to the study, which was published in the Science of the Total Environment journal, there is a trick to “certification”: first, an old-growth tropical forest is cut (or slashed-and-burned) for paper and pulp or valuable tropical timber trades; then a traditional, non-certified palm oil plantation is started; after a certain time the traditional plantation is “transformed” into a certified one and wins a sustainability label.
“The trick is that they make leverage on the absence of historical records on land use change, hiding the reality that even a certified concession was, in the recent past, a highly biodiverse tropical forest,” Prof Gatti said.
His team said they also found a pattern in which deforestation slows when organisations such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil form, but a few years later, the forest loss speeds back up. “This can be also due to the more recent establishment of new ‘sustainable plantations’ and the need to cut new forests to fuel the increasing global market,” according to the researchers.
The report says areas in which forest loss was detected and those of both traditional and certified plantations almost exactly overlap, so any land that is certified today was a “valuable and biodiverse” forest in the recent past.