Land use change effects of oil palm expansion on ecosystem services in Tapi river basin, Thailand

The last decades have shown a strong increase in oil palm production in Thailand. This is increasingly leading to land conversion including loss of forest habitat. However the specific direct and indirect land use effects of oil palm expansion in Thailand are as yet insufficiently understood. We selected the Tapi river Basin and model land use change caused by oil palm expansion. We analysed both direct and indirect land use change effects, using spatial analysis in ArcGIS 10.0 in combination with farmer interviews. Our analysis shows that in the first decade after 2000, direct-land-use-change (dLUC) amounted to 102,000 ha, and exceeded the number of hectares that were converted due to indirect-land-use-change (iLUC). Rubber was most frequently replaced by oil palm, but there was also conversion of natural ecosystems. More recently, in particular between 2009 and 2012, iLUC strongly increased. Forests were cleared for rubber production as an indirect effect of oil palm expansion. We also quantified the land use change effects on selected ecosystem services; including crop provisioning service, carbon storage and biodiversity conservation. The crop production (in ton), habitats loss (in ha) and carbon stocks (in ton C) are used as indicators for modelling these services. The stock different method from the 2006 IPCC Guidelines is employed to quantify carbon stocks. The result shows that oil palm expansion increased fresh-fruit-bunch production, however, it reduced other crop production, such as latex, rice and fruits. Carbon storage and biodiversity conservation services were adversely affected due to the conversion of natural forests to oil palm and rubber plantations. Our concern is that the clearance of natural forest significantly increased in the second period compared to the first period. This reflects that arable land available for oil palm in the basin has become very limited. We, therefore, recommend the government to aim for increased production in existing plantations rather than promoting further land use conversion

Assessing the environmental impact of palm oil produced in Thailand

There are several concerns related to the increasing production of palm oil in Southeast Asia, including pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and land conversion. The RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) certification standard provides an incentive for reducing environmental impacts of palm oil production but to date, only few producers have been certified and studies on environmental implications of RSPO certification in Thailand are scarce. The objective of this study is to assess environmental impacts of palm oil production in Thailand. A case study is conducted in the Tapi River basin, accounting for 60% of palm oil production in Thailand. We developed a model to quantify effects of different management practices in plantations and mills producing Crude-Palm-Oil (CPO) – including non-RSPO, potential RSPO, and RSPO certified producers. Our study shows that five activities contribute most to environmental impacts of CPO production; 1) burning fibers in boilers,2) use of fertilizers, 3) wastewater treatment and empty-fruit-bunch disposal, 4) gasoline use in weed cutters and 5) glyphosate use for weed control. Together these activities cause environmental impacts associated with global warming, ozone formation, acidification, and human toxicity problems. RSPO certified producers cause the lowest environmental impacts due to better waste management such as biogas production from wastewater. We found that environmental performance of the most environmental friendly mills considerably exceeds the RSPO standards, which may be related to the interventions of an environmental project in the Tapi basin. Currently, only 11% of CPO in the Tapi River basin is produced by RSPO certified mills, and non-CPO certified mills produce around 60% of CPO. Most of environmental impacts of palm oil production in the basin are therefore caused by non-RSPO certified palm oil mills. We explored two alternative scenarios illustrating that if more mills in the basin would adopt best-practice CPO production processes in line with those group named “RSPO certified”, environmental impacts generated in the basin will be considerably lower

Development of triple bottom line indicators for sustainability assessment framework of Malaysian palm oil industry

The production of crude palm oil has environmental, economic and social implications. A sustainability assessment framework is needed to improve the sustainability performance of crude palm oil production in a carbon-constrained economy. The objective of this paper is to develop Performance Measures for triple bottom line assessment in the Malaysian palm oil industry, which includes Key Performance Indicators and Higher Performance Indicators for implementing the sustainability assessment framework. The Performance Measures of the triple bottom line assessment were built on the framework of Lim and Biswas (Sustainability 7(12):16561–16587, 2015). The measures were further developed through a participatory approach involving stakeholders and area experts, including Government, Industry, Academia and Local Smallholders/Non-Government Organisations. The developed framework presents a final list of Performance Measures, Key Performance Indicators and Higher Performance Indicators using a structured process and introduces weighting factors to the indicators to reflect the difference in the perceived level of importance. The calculation methods of the assessment framework were verified, and finally, the framework was tested using hypothetical data