A review on the environmental impacts of oil palm expansion in the developing tropics

Palm oil is a ubiquitous ingredient found in a wide range of consumer products, including cosmetics, food and beverages, and as a substitute for fossil fuels. The rapid expansion of oil palm in the last few decades has resulted in widespread deforestation, biodiversity loss, and carbon emissions in the tropics. It has also negatively affected the livelihoods of many local communities. However, oil palm production is a highly lucrative business and the oil palm industry has brought about positive impacts on rural development, regional economies as well as lifting small farmers out of poverty. Here, in this chapter we pull together the literature on the broad environmental impacts of oil palm expansion and present an overview of the most recent research which are related to the loss of natural habitats, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. We take into account geographical and managements contexts, and analyse how current sustainability initiatives are addressing these issues. Our analysis shows that the most developed oil palm sustainability initiative, a voluntary certification scheme known as RSPO, addresses to different degrees the majority of the impacts identified from the expansion of this crop at the plantation level. However, because of the broad range of requirements, the uptake of this certification scheme among smaller producers has been low. Furthermore, certification schemes have a limited role to tackle the broader impacts of oil-palm agriculture at larger scales. We argue that additional mechanisms that promote an integrated land-use planning approach to oil palm landscapes and producing regions are needed, if the negative cumulative impacts from these initiatives are to be minimized and the positive benefits maximized.