Could Replacing Palm Oil Make Deforestation Worse?

A new study suggests that replacing palm oil with conventional vegetable oils could have unintended climate consequences. So what’s the ultimate sustainable fat solution?

Tasteless, odourless, inexpensive, and present in half of all supermarket products, palm oil is well and truly ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, its functional attributes are as big as its climate footprint. Accounting for 40% of global oil production, it’s a major driver of tropical deforestation, and oil palm plantations have been directly responsible for widespread wildfires in Indonesia and Malaysia in recent years.

It’s also a threat to wildlife and human rights, particularly Indigenous communities, though none of this has stopped production from increasing tenfold since 1980. Global demand continues to grow today, putting more forests at risk of being felled and burned – a form of mass deforestation that emits greenhouse gases while removing the trees that would sequester them.

It’s why climate and human rights activists have called for replacing the widespread use of palm oil in both our diets and global supply chains. Its impact on the latter is evident in the fallout from Indonesia’s ban on illicit palm oil exports, which has left local producers with a large excess of the commodity, whose value fell by 18% last month after hitting a 30-month high in December.

As part of its Planetary Health Diet, the Eat-Lancet Commission recommends reducing the consumption of resource-intensive foods like meat and dairy, maintaining palm oil intake, and increasing the amount of unsaturated fats people eat (including vegetable oils like soybean, sunflower, and rapeseed).

However, a new study by scientists at the Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) warns that replacing palm oil with vegetable fats can actually be worse for the planet, using up more land, generating more emissions, and causing more deforestation.

The perils of swapping palm with vegetable oil

The researchers developed an algorithm to determine land use changes under four scenarios of replacing palm oil, from not substituting it at all to doing so for 25%, 50% and 100% of the fat.

To meet the Planetary Health Diet’s demand, global vegetable oil production for food would need to rise by 74%, requiring 317 million hectares of land (68% higher than if current intake levels were maintained). This could drive the loss of up to 120 million hectares of forests, as well as an 87% increase in emissions from land use change (reaching as much as 1,210 megatonnes of CO2e per year).

According to the study, published in the Global Change Biology journal, substituting palm oil with these unsaturated fats won’t solve this issue – it would make it worse.

The total land required to replace palm oil with vegetable oils “tends to increase with the growing percentage of palm oil replacement”, the analysis found, reaching up to 385 million hectares. In addition, it was linked to greater deforestation rates, affecting 148 million hectares of land (versus 120 million hectares under the Eat-Lancet Commission’s scenario).

In line with the Planetary Health Diet, boosting vegetable oil production will raise land use change emissions by 87% compared to current consumption trends. But replacing palm oil with sunflower, soybean and rapeseed oils will lead to a further 26% hike in emissions (versus the Eat-Lancet scenario), generating 1,525 megatonnes of CO2e per year.

“This is due to the fact that when palm oil is replaced by the other three unsaturated oils, a greater amount of land is required proportionally,” the authors explained.

The clearing of wheat, maize, rice and other plantations for palm and vegetable oil production could also threaten food security. For example, up to 4.7 million hectares of wheat crops would become suitable for rapeseed oil and another six million tonnes for sunflower oil, which could impact 12 million hectares of maize cultivations.

Full breadth of Planetary Health Diet can drastically cut emissions

While the study might make it seem like the Eat-Lancet Commission’s recommendations are unsuitable, the researchers highlighted a major caveat. The Planetary Health Diet envisions an increase in foods like vegetable oils, fruits and legumes; at the same time, it calls for a decrease in the consumption of foods like red meat, starchy vegetables, and eggs.

“As such, this dietary shift aimed at promoting a healthful and well-balanced diet with optimal caloric intake will result in an overall 49% reduction of the projected global GHG emissions, allowing to limit the global food production to the boundary of sustainability at five gigatonnes of CO2e per year,” the authors wrote.

There can be even more favourable climate outcomes for this diet if we can successfully halve global food waste and loss. Separate research has linked the Planetary Health Diet with a 17% cut in food emissions. The CMCC study highlighted the land use and emissions changes solely from the future consumption of vegetable oils.

The scientists stressed “the growing importance of certification schemes for sustainable and deforestation-free food supply chains”, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which suggests that a fifth of global palm oil production doesn’t contribute to agriculture-driven deforestation.

“Expanding sustainability efforts across the entire palm oil sector and other vegetable oils is essential to preventing biodiversity loss and the conversion of carbon-rich lands, thus ensuring sustainable oil consumption in our diets,” said lead author Maria Vincenza Chiriacò.

“It must be desirable that the attention to sustainable production would be paid to all vegetable oils, so [as] to avoid the conversion of lands with high biodiversity and carbon content, such as forests, for any potential oilseed crop expansion, particularly in countries where deforestation is likely to occur or biodiversity is not adequately preserved,” the study added.

It is another reason why the growing crop of sustainable palm alternatives – which use microbes, food waste and fermentation to produce fats – is more important than ever. British firms PALM-ALT and Clean Food Group, New York-based C16 Biosciences, Dutch startups Time-Travelling Milkman and NoPalm Ingredients, and Estonia’s Äio are some of the players innovating in this space.