Species Richness and Carbon Footprints of Vegetable Oils: Can High Yields Outweigh Palm Oil’s Environmental Impact?

Robert Beyer,Tim Rademacher

doi:10.3390/su13041813

Abstract

Palm oil has been widely criticised for its high environmental impacts, leading to calls to replace it with alternative vegetable oils in food and cosmetic products. However, substituting palm oil would be environmentally beneficial only if the environmental footprint per litre oil were lower than those of alternative vegetable oils. Whether this is the case is not obvious, given the high oil yields of oil palm of up to 10 times those of alternative crops. Here, we combine global agricultural and environmental datasets to show that, among the world’s seven major vegetable oil crops (oil palm, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, groundnut, coconut, olive), oil palm has the lowest average species richness and carbon footprint associated with an annual production of one litre of vegetable oil. For each crop, these yield-adjusted footprints differ substantially between major producer countries, which we find to be largely the result of differences in crop management. Closing agricultural yield gaps of oil crops through improved management practices would significantly reduce the environmental footprints per oil yield. This would minimise the need for further land conversion to oil cropland and indeed could increase production to such an extent that a significant area of oil croplands could be ecologically restored.

Highlights

Deforestation for palm oil production has caused substantial greenhouse gas emissions, from the loss of carbon stored in the natural vegetation and soil, especially on peatland [5,6,7,8]
In the case of oil palm, both average species richness and carbon footprints p.y. are much lower in Southeast Asian producer countries than in Nigeria; similar differences between producing countries exist for other crops
Whilst oil palm planted in five out of the six major palm oil-producing countries is associated with the lowest average carbon footprint p.y. out of all countries and crops considered in Figure 1B, species richness footprints p.y. of rapeseed grown in France and Germany and of sunflower grown in France are slightly lower than that of oil palm grown in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia

Summary

Introduction

Over the last two decades, oil palm has likely been more strongly associated with environmental destruction than any other crop [1,2]. Deforestation for palm oil production has caused substantial greenhouse gas emissions, from the loss of carbon stored in the natural vegetation and soil, especially on peatland [5,6,7,8]. Oil palm cropping has been strongly associated with biodiversity loss [9,10,11,12,13]. Species richness in oil palm plantations is often significantly reduced compared to that of natural forests [4,9,12,13,14]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion