The ongoing controversies surrounding the palm oil industry is something we at sdupdate have previously reported on. In essence, this export-driven industry has been expanding rapidly in the past decades, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia. This growth has come at the expense of lowland rainforests and their associated biodiversity. Studies indicate that the loss of animal species in these areas is among the sharpest in the world. Other consequences is the release of greenhouse gases and the contamination of nearby water sources. The other side of the coin, however, has been highlighted by economists that argue that palm oil can be a positive force in lifting a large chunk of the Indonesian population out of poverty.

Loading oil palm fruit from plantations in Malaysia. Photo by Tom Hermansson Snickars/Azote

What certain palm oil producers are doing, in an effort to be less environmentally destructive, is to adopt strategies to enhance biodiversity within plantations. This follows the examples set by certain coffee plantations, and includes strategies such as producing oil palm beneath shade trees, having diverse agro-forestry at plantation borders and maintaining forest patches on plantations. These guidelines are a cornerstone of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification program. The RSPO promotes the protection of forest fragments that have High Conservation Value (HCV) within existing plantations, plus avoiding conversion of HCV forests into new oil plantations, as a means of mitigating losses of biodiversity. However, the forest fragment strategy has been put under the microscope by a team of scientists from the UK, Malaysia and the US that have investigated how friendly this specific "eco-friendly" palm oil plantations strategy is. The study, currently in press at Conservation Letters, suggests that these fragments do little to protect threatened species.

The team judged the effectiveness of ‘wildlife-friendly’ patches, by surveying the bird diversity at oil palm plantations and a forest reserve in Borneo. In forest fragments on oil palm estates, the researchers detected 60 times fewer endangered bird species than in unfragmented forest. Larger patches fared better than smaller ones, but as the authors conclude, they “would have to be hundreds or thousands of hectares… to have the same abundance of priority birds as contiguous forest". Rather than spending resources on maintaining these forest patches, the researchers say, oil palm producers should focus on protecting unfragmented forest outside their estates