To get the same amount of alternative oils like soybean, coconut, or sunflower oil you would need anything between 4 and 10 times more land, which would just shift the problem to other parts of the world and threaten other habitats, species and communities. Furthermore, there are millions of smallholder farmers who depend on producing palm oil for their livelihoods. Boycotting palm oil is not the answer. Instead, we need to demand more action to tackle the issues and go further and faster.
RSPO certified palm oil protects the environment and the local communities who depend on it for their livelihoods, so that palm oil can continue to play a key role in food security, economic development and food supply chains. We should continue to use RSPO certified palm oil in products, as replacing it would result in more deforestation and natural habitat conversion. In November , the RSPO standard was strengthened and it now represents an essential tool that can help companies achieve their commitments to palm oil that is free of deforestation, conversion of other natural habitats like peatlands, and the exploitation of people.
In , the UK Government recognised that we were part of the palm oil problem and could also be part of the solution. An area that represents a substantial gap in the uptake of certified sustainable palm the use of palm-derived ingredients in animal feed — for chickens, pigs and cows, for example.
Much of this palm oil material is unlikely to be certified. The best thing we can do is support sustainable palm oil and avoid boycotts, since we know substitutions with other vegetable oils can lead to even further environmental and social harm.
Check out our new WWF Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard to see which brands and retailers are committed to sustainable palm oil free of deforestation and destruction of nature. Fundraising Block. Adopt Please select an elephant a lion a panda a turtle an african rhino an orangutan a dolphin an amur leopard a gorilla a snow leopard a polar bear a penguin a jaguar.
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Science The controversial sale of 'Big John,' the world's largest Triceratops. This might not be as strange as it seems: the majority of oil fields around the world are the fossilised remains of algae. David Nelson is one plant geneticist who has been investigating the promise of algae. His research into the genetics of Chloroidium , a microscopic alga common in Abu Dhabi suggests it could be a viable alternative to palm oil.
Oil can be extracted from algae but growing it on a scale that could compete with palm oil is proving difficult Credit: Getty Images. The alga produces an oil very similar to palm oil, coating its spores to help them survive the arid conditions.
His team hopes to grow the alga in vats or open ponds, allowing this oil to be harvested. But Nelson says it may require a major shift in the market for it to take off. In ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics announced they had created a strain of algae that produced double the amount of oil as its predecessor.
Last year, carmaker Honda installed an experimental algal farm at its Ohio plant that captures carbon dioxide from the engine test centres. They hope to make the system modular, to allow more plants to adopt it. And the San Francisco-based biotech firm Solazyme has already developed algal-derived fuels for automobile, aircraft and military applications.
But getting these products to the point where they can compete economically and at scale with palm oil is a major hurdle. In , Ohio University began a pilot algal farm, but the man in charge, mechanical engineer David Bayless, confesses that he had little progress to show in the six years since. Some firms are also investigating whether yeasts can be engineered to produce the kinds of oils demanded by the food and cosmetic industry, although work here is at an even earlier stage than algal oil farms.
The most controlled and efficient way to grow them is in large closed vats, but in this arrangement algae and yeast need to be fed sugar to grow, and lots of it.
That sugar has to be grown somewhere, so the environmental impact of the end product is simply moved elsewhere. To do that, we have to take a step back and see what ultimate drives demand for palm oil. Oil palms are hugely productive and cheap to grow, which has been largely responsible for their rapid proliferation Credit: Getty Images. As well as its unique chemistry, palm oil is cheap. A hectare of oil palm can reliably produce four tonnes of vegetable oil every year, compared to 0.
Under ideal conditions, high-yield oil palm cultivars can produce more than 25 times as much oil as soy can for the same area of farmland. Thus, ironically, a ban on palm oil would lead to a catastrophic increase in deforestation, as anything we replace it with will need much more land to grow on. But it is possible to grow oil palm in a way that limits its impact on the environment.
But demand for sustainable palm oil, and the willingness to pay a price premium for it, is limited. The market for sustainable palm oil is already over-supplied, leading to producers selling certified oil unlabelled on the wider market. And the RPSO has been criticised as opaque and ineffectual, with little power to compel change among growers. What if we could reduce the pressure on tropical rainforests by creating a plant that was just as productive as oil palm, but could grow anywhere?
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