• Authors:
    • Yeh, S.
    • Yui, S.
  • Source: Environmental Research Letters
  • Volume: 8
  • Issue: 4
  • Year: 2013
  • Summary: Brazil aims to increase palm oil production to meet the growing national and global demand for edible oil and biodiesel while preserving environmentally and culturally significant areas. As land use change (LUC) is the result of complex interactions between socio-economic and biophysical drivers operating at multiple temporal and spatial scales, the type and location of LUC depend on drivers such as neighboring land use, conversion elasticity, access to infrastructure, distance to markets, and land suitability. The purpose of this study is to develop scenarios to measure the impact of land conversion under three different enforcement scenarios (none, some, and strict enforcement). We found that converting 22.5 million hectares of land can produce approximately 29 billion gallons (110 billion liters) of biodiesel a year. Of that, 22-71% of the area can come from forest land, conservation units, wetland and indigenous areas, emitting 14-84 gCO(2)e MJ(-1). This direct land use emission alone can be higher than the carbon intensity of diesel that it intends to displace for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. This letter focuses narrowly on GHG emissions and does not address socio-economic-ecological prospects for these degraded lands for palm oil or for other purposes. Future studies should carefully evaluate these tradeoffs.
  • Authors:
    • Smith,Lydia J.
    • Torn,Margaret S.
  • Source: Climatic Change
  • Volume: 118
  • Issue: 1
  • Year: 2013
  • Summary: Terrestrial biological atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (BCDR) through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECS), afforestation/reforestation, and forest and soil management is a family of proposed climate change mitigation strategies. Very high sequestration potentials for these strategies have been reported, but there has been no systematic analysis of the potential ecological limits to and environmental impacts of implementation at the scale relevant to climate change mitigation. In this analysis, we identified site-specific aspects of land, water, nutrients, and habitat that will affect local project-scale carbon sequestration and ecological impacts. Using this framework, we estimated global-scale land and resource requirements for BCDR, implemented at a rate of 1 Pg C y(-1). We estimate that removing 1 Pg C y(-1) via tropical afforestation would require at least 7 x 10(6) ha y(-1) of land, 0.09 Tg y(-1) of nitrogen, and 0.2 Tg y(-1) of phosphorous, and would increase evapotranspiration from those lands by almost 50 %. Switchgrass BECS would require at least 2 x 10(8) ha of land (20 times U.S. area currently under bioethanol production) and 20 Tg y(-1) of nitrogen (20 % of global fertilizer nitrogen production), consuming 4 x 10(12) m(3) y(-1) of water. While BCDR promises some direct (climate) and ancillary (restoration, habitat protection) benefits, Pg C-scale implementation may be constrained by ecological factors, and may compromise the ultimate goals of climate change mitigation.
  • Authors:
    • Randerson, J.
    • Foley, J.
    • Giglio, L.
    • Jin, Y.
    • Lin, H.
  • Source: Ecological Applications
  • Volume: 22
  • Issue: 4
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Fires in agricultural ecosystems emit greenhouse gases and aerosols that influence climate on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Annex 1 countries of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), many of which ratified the Kyoto Protocol, are required to report emissions of CH 4 and N 2O from these fires annually. In this study, we evaluated several aspects of this reporting system, including the optimality of the crops targeted by the UNFCCC globally and within Annex 1 countries, and the consistency of emissions inventories among different countries. We also evaluated the success of individual countries in capturing interannual variability and long-term trends in agricultural fire activity. In our approach, we combined global high-resolution maps of crop harvest area and production, derived from satellite maps and ground-based census data, with Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements of active fires. At a global scale, we found that adding ground nuts (e.g., peanuts), cocoa, cotton and oil palm, and removing potato, oats, rye, and pulse other from the list of 14 crops targeted by the UNFCCC increased the percentage of active fires covered by the reporting system by 9%. Optimization led to a different recommended list for Annex 1 countries, requiring the addition of sunflower, cotton, rapeseed, and alfalfa and the removal of beans, sugarcane, pulse others, and tuber-root others. Extending emissions reporting to all Annex 1 countries (from the current set of 19 countries) would increase the efficacy of the reporting system from 6% to 15%, and further including several non-Annex 1 countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Mexico, and Nigeria) would capture over 55% of active fires in croplands worldwide. Analyses of interannual trends from the United States and Australia showed the importance of both intensity of fire use and crop production in controlling year-to-year variations in agricultural fire emissions. Remote sensing provides an effective means for evaluating some aspects of the current UNFCCC emissions reporting system; and, if combined with census data, field experiments and expert opinion, has the potential to improve the robustness of the next generation inventory system.
  • Authors:
    • Dressler, W.
    • Ryan, C. M.
    • Leisz, S. J.
    • Bruun, T. B.
    • Fox, J. M.
    • Lawrence, D.
    • Webb, E. L.
    • Yuen, J. Q.
    • Phelps, J.
    • Ziegler, A. D.
    • Mertz, O.
    • Pascual, U.
    • Padoch, ,C.
    • Koh, L. P.
  • Source: GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY
  • Volume: 18
  • Issue: 10
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Policy makers across the tropics propose that carbon finance could provide incentives for forest frontier communities to transition away from swidden agriculture (slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation) to other systems that potentially reduce emissions and/or increase carbon sequestration. However, there is little certainty regarding the carbon outcomes of many key land-use transitions at the center of current policy debates. Our meta-analysis of over 250 studies reporting above- and below-ground carbon estimates for different land-use types indicates great uncertainty in the net total ecosystem carbon changes that can be expected from many transitions, including the replacement of various types of swidden agriculture with oil palm, rubber, or some other types of agroforestry systems. These transitions are underway throughout Southeast Asia, and are at the heart of REDD+ debates. Exceptions of unambiguous carbon outcomes are the abandonment of any type of agriculture to allow forest regeneration (a certain positive carbon outcome) and expansion of agriculture into mature forest (a certain negative carbon outcome). With respect to swiddening, our meta-analysis supports a reassessment of policies that encourage land-cover conversion away from these [especially long-fallow] systems to other more cash-crop-oriented systems producing ambiguous carbon stock changes - including oil palm and rubber. In some instances, lengthening fallow periods of an existing swidden system may produce substantial carbon benefits, as would conversion from intensely cultivated lands to high-biomass plantations and some other types of agroforestry. More field studies are needed to provide better data of above- and below-ground carbon stocks before informed recommendations or policy decisions can be made regarding which land-use regimes optimize or increase carbon sequestration. As some transitions may negatively impact other ecosystem services, food security, and local livelihoods, the entire carbon and noncarbon benefit stream should also be taken into account before prescribing transitions with ambiguous carbon benefits.
  • Authors:
    • Harun, M. H.
  • Source: Oil Palm Bulletin
  • Issue: 65
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Measurements of actual greenhouse gases (GHG) like CO 2, CH 4 and N 2O emissions from tropical peatlands in Malaysia are needed to understand the role of peatlands as carbon sequesters (sink) or source when establishing oil palm plantations on tropical peatland. Long-term eddy covariance (EC) measurements, together with carefully focused ecological measurements of meteorological and flux data, can potentially identify the relevant climatic factors and partition of the net GHG flux from the whole ecosystem into contributions from the various major components, and quantify the effects of climatic variations on seasonal and annual net uptake of CO 2. Direct measurements of CO 2 flux using the EC method involving air temperature, precipitation, windspeed, vapour pressure deficit (VPD), net radiation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) fluxes, sensible heat flux, latent heat and net ecosystem CO 2 exchange (NEE), can define the magnitude of net CO 2 fluxes and net ecosystem production on time scales ranging from hourly to seasonal, annual and inter-annual, for comparing intact and converted forest ecosystems into oil palm plantations. These observations are capable of elucidating the relationships between net CO 2 sequestration and underlying environmental and ecosystem parameters, on time scales long enough to be highly relevant to climate issues. Therefore, the flux measurements provide unique fundamental mechanistic, process and environmental data for evaluating ecosystem models, and for assessing the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon balance. A sequence of actions are needed for a successful EC experimental set-up, data collection and processing, such as design of the experiment, implementation and data processing. A multi-disciplinary, fully integrated and focused study team is needed for each site in order to obtain the full suite of observations, and to acquire an understanding of the underlying processes through the correct data collection, processing and interpretation. Some problems are anticipated during installation of an EC system on peatland, such as peat subsidence, varying peat depths and low bulk density as a result of the existence of a water table. The tower design should not obstruct air flow and affect the instruments' sensors. The tower should be suitably placed at the study site so that the useful footprint from all winds is maximised. Instruments should be placed at a maximum height that still allows for a useful footprint. The maintenance plan should include periodic sensor cleaning and replacement, a calibration schedule, planned replacement of damaged cables and other repairs to the instrument system. Direct measurements of GHG such as CO 2, CH 4 and N 2O fluxes from tropical peatlands in Malaysia can be done using the EC method, which must be supported by the chamber method to measure the influence of soil respiration on GHG emission and uptake rate from peatland converted to oil palm plantation. A suitable tower design with a strong tower foundation support can minimise damage to the study site. Together with a strict maintenance programme implemented during the duration of the study can ensure the successful collection of good data.
  • Authors:
    • Sjoegersten, S.
    • Hardy, I. C. W.
    • Choy, A. W. K.
    • Townsend, T. J.
    • Smith, D. R.
  • Source: GCB Bioenergy
  • Volume: 4
  • Issue: 5
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Oil palm plantations cover similar to 14.6 similar to million similar to ha worldwide and the total area under cultivation is expected to increase during the 21st century . Indonesia and Malaysia together account for 87% of global palm oil production and the combined harvested area in these countries has expanded by 6.5 similar to million similar to ha since 1990. Despite this, soil C cycling in oil palm systems is not well quantified but such information is needed for C budget inventories. We quantified soil C storage (root biomass, soil organic matter (SOM) and microbial biomass) and losses [potential soil respiration (Rs) and soil surface CO2 flux (Fs)] in mineral soils from an oil palm plantation chronosequence (1134 similar to years since planting) in Selangor, Malaysia. There were no significant effects of plantation age on SOM, microbial biomass, Rs or Fs, implying soil C was in dynamic equilibrium over the chronosequence. However, there was a significant increase in root biomass with plantation age, indicating a short-term C sink. Across the chronosequence, Rs was driven by soil moisture, soil particle size, root biomass and soil microbial biomass N but not microbial biomass C. This suggests that the nutrient status of the microbial community may be of equal or greater importance for soil CO2 losses than substrate availability and also raises particular concerns regarding the addition of nitrogenous fertilizer, i.e. increased yields will be associated with increased soil CO2 emissions. To fully assess the impact of oil palm plantations on soil C storage, initial soil C losses following land conversion (e.g. from native forest or other previous plantations) must be accounted for. If initial soil C losses are large, our data show that there is no accumulation of stable C in the soil as the plantation matures and hence the conversion to oil palm would probably represent a net loss of soil C.
  • Authors:
    • May, C. Y.
    • Subramaniam, V.
  • Source: Journal of Oil Palm Research
  • Volume: 24
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Currently, carbon footprint, also known as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is such a catch phrase in the world that it has become a must for responsible producers to quantify the carbon footprint of their products. The Malaysian oil palm industry is an export-orientated industry which relies heavily on the world market. Export earnings of oil palm products in 2010 alone reached KM 59.77 billion, while palm kernel oil exports increased to 1.16 million tonnes. However, the oil palm industry is under constant attack for its performance from the perspective of the environment, especially with regard to its GHG emissions. Being an export-orientated industry, this issue has to be tackled head-on to quantify the GHG emissions of the oil palm industry. The objectives of this study were to quantify the GHG emissions from the production of 1 t of crude palm kernel oil (CPKO) at the kernel-crushing plant, and to compare the GHG emissions of 1 t CPKO with and without biogas capture at the palm oil mill for a kernel-crushing plant located near the ports compared to a kernel-crushing plant located near the palm oil mill. The scope of this study is limited to the palm oil mill and the kernel-crushing plant. It starts at the palm oil mill where the fresh fruit bunches (FEB) are received, to the production of palm kernel at the mill, to the transportation of the palm kernel to the kernel-crushing plant, right up till the production of CPKO at the kernel-crushing plant. GHG emission was calculated using the global warming potential and emissions factors. Within the system boundary, the main contributor to GHG emission comes from the biogas at the palm oil mill, followed by the electricity from the grid for processing the palm kernel into CPKO. Capturing the biogas at the palm oil mill where the palm kernel is produced and using the biogas as a renewable energy source, reduces the main GHG emissions in this study. By integrating the kernel-crushing plant with the palm oil mill, GHG emissions from both the electricity to process the palm kernel into CPKO and transportation of the palm kernel to the kernel-crushing plant are reduced significantly. The best scenario will be to integrate the kernel-crushing plant with a palm oil mill that captures its biogas to obtain the best carbon footprint for the production of CPKO.
  • Authors:
    • Agus,Fahmuddin
    • Wahyunto
    • Al Dariah
    • Runtunuwu,Eleonora
    • Susanti,Erni
    • Supriatna,Wahyu
  • Source: Journal of Oil Palm Research
  • Volume: 24
  • Issue: August
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: The peatlands of Indonesia are an increasingly important land resource for the livelihood of the people and for economic development, but they turn rapidly into a carbon source when the peat forests are cleared and drained. Therefore, strategies are needed for the sustainable management of the peatlands and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This research was conducted on 464 642 ha of peatland varying in depth between 200 and 680 cm, in the districts of Kubu Raya and Pontianak, in the West Kalimantan province of Indonesia. It was aimed at: (i) evaluating land use changes in the peatland of the two districts and assessing the CO2 emissions these entail; and (ii) recommending options for mitigation of the CO2 emissions. Satellite images in the years 1986, 2002 and 2008 were used for the evaluation of land use changes. This was followed by ground-truthing of recent land cover in 2009. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders to develop emission reduction strategies. The results show that the peatlands were used for various purposes, including the traditional slash-and-burn agriculture for maize, pineapple plantations, intensive vegetable farming, and rubber and oil palm plantations. The peat forest area decreased by 16% from 393 000 ha in 1986 to 329 390 ha in 2008, while shrubland increased by 153% from 9427 ha to 23 814 ha over the same period of time. Oil palm plantations and paddy fields also increased rapidly in expansion. The main sources of emissions were from peat burning, especially for the slash-and-burn farming, peat decomposition due to drainage, and the loss of biomass depending on the land use trajectories. Emission reduction can be achieved through various scenarios. Scenario I, confining future agricultural land development to peatland with peat of <3 m thick, is expected to reduce by 6.8 +/- 2.9% the 2010 to 2035 cumulative CO2 emissions from the 127 million tonnes 'business as usual' (BAU) level. Scenario II, providing fertiliser subsidy to replace the traditional burning technique in addition to Scenario I, is expected to reduce emissions by as much as 11.5 +/- 4.9%. Scenario III, switching future agricultural expansion to mineral soils, is expected to lower the cumulative emissions by as much as 20.5 +/- 8.8%. These scenarios form the basis for sustainable peatland management and for a state of preparedness to reduce emissions from peatland.
  • Authors:
    • Rodrigues, H. O.
    • Lawrence, D.
    • Gaveau, D. A.
    • Trigg, S. N.
    • Asner, G. P.
    • Soares-Filho, B. S.
    • Pittman, A. M.
    • Ratnasari, D.
    • Curran, L. M.
    • Carlson, K. M.
  • Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • Volume: 109
  • Issue: 19
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Industrial agricultural plantations are a rapidly increasing yet largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover change. Here, we evaluate impacts of oil palm plantation development on land cover, carbon flux, and agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. With a spatially explicit land change/carbon bookkeeping model, parameterized using high-resolution satellite time series and informed by socioeconomic surveys, we assess previous and project future plantation expansion under five scenarios. Although fire was the primary proximate cause of 1989-2008 deforestation (93%) and net carbonemissions (69%), by 2007-2008, oil palm directly caused 27% of total and 40% of peatland deforestation. Plantation land sources exhibited distinctive temporal dynamics, comprising 81% forests on mineral soils (1994-2001), shifting to 69% peatlands (2008-2011). Plantation leases reveal vast development potential. In 2008, leases spanned similar to 65% of the region, including 62% on peatlands and 59% of community-managed lands, yet < 10% of lease area was planted. Projecting business as usual (BAU), by 2020 similar to 40% of regional and 35% of community lands are cleared for oil palm, generating 26% of net carbon emissions. Intact forest cover declines to 4%, and the proportion of emissions sourced from peatlands increases 38%. Prohibiting intact and logged forest and peatland conversion to oil palm reduces emissions only 4% below BAU, because of continued uncontrolled fire. Protecting logged forests achieves greater carbon emissions reductions (21%) than protecting intact forests alone (9%) and is critical for mitigating carbon emissions. Extensive allocated leases constrain land management options, requiring trade-offs among oil palm production, carbon emissions mitigation, and maintaining community landholdings.
  • Authors:
    • Hastings, A.
    • Sim, S.
    • King, H.
    • Keller, E.
    • Canals, L. M. I.
    • Flynn, H. C.
    • Wang, S.
    • Smith, P.
  • Source: Global Change Biology
  • Volume: 18
  • Issue: 5
  • Year: 2012
  • Summary: Many assessments of product carbon footprint (PCF) for agricultural products omit emissions arising from land-use change (LUC). In this study, we developed a framework based on IPCC national greenhouse gas inventory methodologies to assess the impacts of LUC from crop production using oil palm, soybean and oilseed rape as examples. Using ecological zone, climate and soil types fromnatural the top 20 producing countries, calculated emissions for transitions from vegetation to cropland on mineral soils under typical management ranged from -4.5 to 29.4 t CO2-eq ha-1 yr-1 over 20 years for oil palm and 1.247.5 t CO2-eq ha-1 yr-1 over 20 years for soybeans. Oilseed rape showed similar results to soybeans, but with lower maximum values because it is mainly grown in areas with lower C stocks. GHG emissions from other land-use transitions were between 62% and 95% lower than those from natural vegetation for the arable crops, while conversions to oil palm were a sink for C. LUC emissions were considered on a national basis and also expressed per-tonne-of-oil-produced. Weighted global averages indicate that, depending on the land-use transition, oil crop production on newly converted land contributes between -3.1 and 7.0 t CO2-eq t oil production-1 yr-1 for palm oil, 11.950.6 t CO2-eq t oil production-1 yr-1 for soybean oil, and 7.731.4 t CO2-eq t oil production-1 yr-1 for rapeseed oil. Assumptions made about crop and LUC distribution within countries contributed up to 66% error around the global averages for natural vegetation conversions. Uncertainty around biomass and soil C stocks were also examined. Finer resolution data and information (particularly on land management and yield) could improve reliability of the estimates but the framework can be used in all global regions and represents an important step forward for including LUC emissions in PCFs.