Economy or ecosystem: No easy choice for African palm oil
On the African continent, with its pulsing youth and a projected 2.5 billion people by 2050, economic development is a top priority and oil palm plantations provide opportunities. At the same time, Africans already face unprecedented climate change impacts – and some hard decisions about sustainable land use, water, and forest and biodiversity protection come with them.
Striking the balance between economy and environment won’t be that easy when it comes to oil palm cultivation, according to new research published in the American journal PNAS.
Africa is the new frontier for the oil palm industry, historically concentrated in Malaysia, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations. The 21st-century demand for food-industry palm oil is expected to double by 2050, and it’s increasingly seen as a biofuel source, but the history of deforestation and threats to orangutan and other species served as a “lessons learned” cautionary tale when looking at Africa.
So the international team of scientists from France’s CIRAD and the European Commission Joint Research Centre turned to mapping to understand where in Africa’s tropical regions the most productive land for oil palms is located, at the same time that primate populations are protected.
As they looked for the golden mean of compromise, they found there are only 3.3 million hectares of African land – a little bigger than the size of Belgium – where oil palm returns are high but impact on primates is minimal. Large swaths of West and Central Africa’s equatorial forests converted to plantation would likely support oil palm well, but would be a disaster for wildlife and overlapped with the areas where primates are most vulnerable.
The researchers chose to study the 193 primate species because they serve as a good proxy for all biodiversity in a region, and because the monkeys, lemur and other primates already are a well-documented conservation priority, and face threats from logging, mining, agriculture and trafficking.
They noted that some 37 percent of primate species on mainland Africa and an alarming 87 percent of species on the island nation of Madagascar already are under threat of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). If there’s to be an economic ROI for African nations, the value of oil palm plantations needs to warrant the habitat destruction associated with it.
“One potential mitigation strategy would be to identify alternative trajectories for agricultural expansion, using ‘smart’ criteria to minimize and delay the loss of primate home range as much as possible,” said CIRAD ecologist and co-author Ghislain Vieilledent. To that end, the team ran four different plantation scenarios that emphasize either economic or conservation priorities.
Yet the CIRAD team showed that even in a scenario seeking to minimize the impact on biodiversity, five species, on average, would lose habitat space equal to the land converted to oil palm cultivation. It only gets worse when adding the future demand for biofuels, which would threaten 60 million hectares and 60 species – a situation that caused the scientists to urge for more careful transportation-emissions policy.
Other recommendations included consumer awareness, to draw on successful campaigns and decrease palm oil demand. Yet that gets complicated too: A recent IUCN study looking at alternatives found their impacts to be worse than palm oil, further complicating the future for Africa’s economy-environment tensions.
