Borneo’s Land Clearing for Palm Oil is Producing Huge Emissions of Carbon Dioxide

As one of the leading producers of the palm and palm kernel oil Indonesia accounts for more than 30 percent of the world's vegetable oil use that can also be biodiesel. Major expansion of Indonesia's oil palm plantation is occurring on the island of Borneo, also known as Kalimantan, which occupies a land area nearly the size California and Florida combined. 

The palm oil is common ingredient in processed foods, soaps and personal care products,

But the researchers from the University of Stanford and Yale state that clearing of land for the expanding production of palm oil is causing rainforest destruction and massive carbon dioxide emission. The study highlights with the deforestation Borneo is becoming a globally significant source of carbon dioxide emissions.

It is predicted that this plantation process will contribute to more than 558 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2020.

Indonesia that has the world's third largest tropical forest area is also regarded as one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gasses. In 2010 alone, land-clearing for oil palm plantations in Kalimantan emitted more than 140 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

"Despite contentious debate over the types and uses of lands slated for oil palm plantations, the sector has grown rapidly over the past 20 years," said project leader Lisa M. Curran, a professor of ecological anthropology at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. 

By combining field measurements with analyses of high-resolution satellite images, the study evaluated lands targeted for plantations and documented their carbon emissions when converted to oil palm.

"A major breakthrough occurred when we were able to discern not only forests and non-forested lands, but also logged forests, as well as mosaics of rice fields, rubber stands, fruit gardens and mature secondary forests used by smallholder farmers for their livelihoods," said Kimberly Carlson, a Yale doctoral student and lead author of the study. "With this information, we were able to develop robust carbon bookkeeping accounts to quantify carbon emissions from oil palm development."

The team worked on the oil palm land lease records during interviews with local and regional governmental agencies.

"These plantation leases are an unprecedented 'grand-scale experiment' replacing forests with exotic palm monocultures," said Curran. "We may see tipping points in forest conversion where critical biophysical functions are disrupted, leaving the region increasingly vulnerable to droughts, fires and floods."

NASA Land Cover/Land-Use Change Program, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Santa Fe Institute and the National Science Foundation, supported the study "Carbon Emissions from Forest Conversion by Kalimantan Oil Palm Plantations".

The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.