How the palm oil industry is cooking the climate

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Every year, 1.8 billion tonnes (Gt) of climate changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are released by the degradation and burning of Indonesia's peatlands – 4% of global GHG emissions from less than 0.1% of the land on earth.

This report shows how, through growing demand for palm oil, the world's largest food, cosmetic and biofuel industries are driving the wholesale destruction of peatlands and rainforests. These companies include Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble, who between them account for a significant volume of global palm oil use, mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia.

Overlaying satellite imagery of forest fires with maps indicating the locations of the densest carbon stores in Indonesia, Greenpeace researchers have been able to pinpoint carbon 'hotspots'. Our research has taken us to the Indonesian province of Riau on the island of Sumatra, to document the current activities of those involved in the expansion of palm oil. These are the producers who trade with Unilever, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble, as well as many of the other top names in the food, cosmetic and biofuel industries.

The area of peatland in Riau is tiny: just 4 million hectares, about the size of Taiwan or Switzerland. Yet Riau's peatlands store 14.6Gt of carbon – if these peatlands were destroyed, the resulting GHG emissions would be equivalent to one year's total global emissions.

Unless efforts are made to halt forest and peatland destruction, emissions from these peatlands may trigger a 'climate bomb'.

Forests as ticking climate bombs

Forest ecosystems currently store about one and a half times as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere. Without drastic cuts in GHG emissions, climate change – which is in part driven by forest destruction – may soon tip these carbon stores into sources of emissions. Resulting temperature increase could disrupt ecosystems in ways that provoke yet more greenhouse emissions, potentially leading to further acceleration of climate change.

Conclusions from the world's leading climate scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that large cuts in GHG emissions are needed rapidly. Time is desperately short. The greater the delay in realising emissions reductions, the higher the financial, social and ecological costs will be.

Indonesia's rainforests and peatlands in the political spotlight

Indonesia offers a critical example of why GHG emissions arising from deforestation and land-use change need to be dealt with at the international level, by governments and corporations. Indonesia holds the global record for GHG emissions through deforestation, putting it third behind the USA and China in terms of total man-made GHG emissions. During the last 50 years, over 74 million hectares of Indonesia's forests have been destroyed – logged, burned, degraded, pulped – and its products shipped round the planet.

Unlike industrialised country (Annex I) signatories to the Kyoto climate treaty, Indonesia – as a developing country – is not required to set a target to reduce its GHG emissions. Consequently, since the Kyoto Protocol provides no incentives for preventing the destruction of tropical forests, the expansion of palm oil into carbon-rich landscapes such as peatlands and rainforests makes short-term economic sense but no ecological sense.

In December 2007, negotiating teams from governments around the world will gather in Bali, Indonesia to thrash out an agreement that will ideally lead to an international plan to deliver deep cuts in global GHG emissions, as an extension of the current Kyoto climate treaty.

These climate negotiations are first steps toward international political measures to tackle deforestation. Meanwhile, global industry continues business-as-usual, and is expanding into the world's rainforests.

Palm oil's boom!

NASA's climate scientists warn that 'continued rapid growth of CO2 emissions and infrastructure for another decade' may make halting high-risk increase in global temperatures 'impractical if not impossible'.