L26. Global Perspectives
We started off this course by discussing the concept of “not in my backyard”. Repeatedly throughout the semester we have seen instances of countries with strict environmental regulations shifting the impacts of consumption to other, often less developed, nations. In the U.S. we’ve seen this issue with non-renewable resources like copper, sand, and gravel, but also with a biorenewable resource - timber. While writing your L7 reflections, some of you found that the demand for lumber and paper from plantation forests may contribute to the destruction of tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia. In Lesson 23 we learned that in order to “go green” the European Union started burning wood pellets instead of coal, but the majority of that wood is sourced from the US and Canada. In today’s highly interconnected world, it can be difficult to determine whether the actions we take are reducing our environmental impact, or simply moving it elsewhere.
Palm Oil Biodiesel
An excellent example of good environmental intentions gone wrong is the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive (RED). Passed in 2009, the RED is the EU’s equivalent of our Renewable Fuel Standard, mandating that 10% of their transportation fuels come from renewable sources by 2020. In 2015, biofuels made up about 4% of the EU’s transportation fuels, with the vast majority (~80%) coming from biodiesel. Without government regulation over the biomass feedstock for biodiesel production, it was up to the market to decide. A cheap option was palm oil, so a significant amount of the EU’s biodiesel was made with palm oil imported from Indonesia and Malaysia (Figure 1). In the US, palm oil-based biodiesel does not meet the minimum GHG lifecycle emissions reduction threshold set by the Renewable Fuel Standard. However, the EPA allows facilities that commenced construction before December 2007 to continue to secure renewable fuel credits for palm oil-based biofuels.
Figure 1. Feedstocks Used for EU Biodiesel Production, 2015.
The problem with palm oil is that it’s associated with land use change. We’ve talked about land use changes previously in this class, for example, with plantation forests. A plantation forest in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you cut down a diverse old-growth forest and replace it with a plantation monoculture, that’s probably not so good. Another example is herbaceous crops - when we cut down a forest or replace a prairie with cropland (e.g. corn, soy), there will be some negative environmental impacts. There are two ways in which land use change can occur: direct and indirect.
If forestland is cut down and converted to a palm oil plantation, this is direct land use change. But even if the palm oil trees are being planted on existing cropland, it may still cause deforestation indirectly by displacing the crop that was originally growing on that land. Much of the expansion of palm oil plantations has occurred in rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia. The soil of these forests are rich in peat, which is a highly valued as a carbon store. In fact, peatlands store more carbon than all other vegetation types in the world combined. To convert the rainforests to palm oil plantations, the trees are burned and the peat along with it. This results in massive carbon emissions. So an attempt to lower the carbon footprint of fuels via the widespread adoption of biodiesel in Europe resulted in increased carbon emissions. The following video provides a visual of the issues associated with palm oil production.
In January 2018, the European Parliament called for a total ban on palm oil use in road fuel by 2020. After an outcry from palm oil producers in SE Asia, this was negotiated to capping palm oil usage at 2019 levels until 2023 and reducing it to zero by 2030.
Changing the biofuel standards will not stop tropical deforestation, because only 46% of palm oil imported into the EU is used for biodiesel. As you saw in the video, palm oil is ubiquitous in foods and cosmetics. It’s estimated that half of all packaged food at the supermarket contains palm oil (in the US too!). Therefore, if we want to solve the problem, we must look at the products we consume on a daily basis, not just biodiesel.
Boycott Palm Oil!
Woah, not so fast...
Globally the issue of the environmental impact of palm oil has not gone unnoticed. A group called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) formed in 2004 and now has over 3,000 members worldwide. Members include all sectors of the palm oil business – producers, processors, manufacturers, retailers, bankers, environmental groups, and social organizations. Their goal is insure that palm oil is sustainably produced and suggest that the social and environmental impact of banning palm oil would be far worse that the sustainable use of palm oil.
Here is what RSPO says Links to an external site.:
- “Replacing palm oil with other types of vegetable oil (such as sunflower, soybean or rapeseed oil) would mean that much larger amounts of land would need to be used, since palm trees produce 4-10 times more oil than other crops per unit of cultivated land. This would result in serious environmental damage, with the risk that more forests would need to be converted into agricultural land.
- In producing countries, millions of farmers and their families work in the palm oil sector. Palm oil plays an important role in the reduction of poverty in these areas. In Indonesia and Malaysia, a total of 4.5 million people earn their living from palm oil production. Stopping the production of palm oil altogether would create significant problems for these people who support their families by working in this industry.
- Replacing palm oil with other types of oil is not always feasible due to palm oil’s unique properties as food ingredient. Using other oils would not give the products the same texture and taste that palm oil offers.”
Palm oil makes a great biofuel because of the amount of oil produced per acre of land. Cradle to grave LCAs of palm oil for biodiesel is far superior to that of petroleum biodiesel and other agricultural crops. That is, if there is no land clearing to produce the palm oil and the palm oil is grown sustainably. Of course it is always best to reduce the use of all energy through conservation and efficiency. A study done by the World Wildlife Federation looked at the alternatives for palm oil consumption in Germany. Their findings suggested that replacing sustainable grown palm oil for locally grown vegetable oil is worse for both the environment and biodiversity (Palm Oil Report Germany Links to an external site.).
Forest Certification & Corruption
This next example highlights issues with forest certification in other countries - issues that don’t exist in “our backyard” in the US. In Lesson 15 we talked about forest certification as a way to ensure that products such as lumber and paper are coming from forests that are managed according to a certain set of standards and values. Remember that there is typically an economic incentive for timber producers to get their forests certified, because they can charge more for the products. Which means there are clear reasons to engage in certification which have nothing to do with the quality of forest management. Therefore the success of the sustainability aspects of forest certification programs depends heavily on good governance and quality law enforcement. In countries where these conditions aren’t met, there may be little environmental value in certification.
Corruption is a well-known issue in tropical forest management. Corruption occurs in the forest sector because laws can often be complex to comply with, forests are usually remote and far from government offices, and public officers in control of the forest earn low salaries. Forms of corruption in industrial forestry include bribery or excessive/inappropriate influence in: the allocation of licences, the determination of concession terms, the application of royalty payments, and the implementation of monitoring systems (Søreide 2007). Corruption is also tied closely to illegal harvesting.
Source: Certified integrity? Forest certification and anti-corruption Links to an external site.
And so we have a difficult problem: corruption in forestry could be reduced by increased certification, but certification may only be effective in countries where corruption is already low.
As we learned in L15, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certifies forests in 80 countries around the globe. Around 30% of the FSC’s forests are in countries that score poorly on the World Bank’s “Control of Corruption” Indicator. A map of government effectiveness - which can be seen as the opposite of corruption - is shown in Figure 2. Some of the low-scoring countries (and the number of FSC certificates in that country) include: Venezuela (3), Papua New Guinea (8), Congo (5), Côte d'Ivoire (1), Laos (12), Pakistan (9), Bangladesh (11), Ukraine (41), Cameroon (17), and interestingly, Russia (with a whopping 239 FSC certificates). While the FSC does have some anti-corruption mechanisms in place, the organizations that focus on montioring forest certification do not have an anti-corruption focus, and there are ways to manipulate forest and financial audits. One example is “creaming” where forests are deliberately thinned right before data to establish a baseline is collected.
Figure 2. Map of government effectiveness. Green countries have the highest effectiveness and lowest corruption. Red countries have the most corruption. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (discussed in the example below) is highlighted, and scores in the lowest percentile.
In March 2011, Greenpeace International called for a ban on FSC certification in the Congo Basin. The organization argued that expansion of certification into forest regions with poor governance and high levels of corruption was leading to “…a number of logging companies that fail to comply with FSC standards being awarded certification” (Greenpeace 2011 Links to an external site.). Of particular concern was a FSC Chain-of-Custody certificate awarded to Sodefor, a controversial logging company in the Democratic Republic of Congo (outlined in black on the map above). According to Greenpeace, Sodefor had “…a track record of social conflicts that have resulted in violence, arbitrary arrests and human rights violations”. The organization also argued that forest certification was actually exacerbating corrupt land use planning and resource allocation. In response, the FSC released a report addressing how forest certification is handled in the Congo Basin. Nothing came of the request for a ban.
While forest certification is an effective way to ensure forests are managed sustainably in the US and other countries with good governance, this is not always the case in other countries, and we should understand this before we import timber. Even if the products are “certified” it doesn’t prove that the forest management standards were being met.
Environmental issues related to biorenewable resources are complex and globally interconnected. While our natural tendency is to protect the environment nearest to us, sometimes the most sustainable option is to extract the resources in our own backyard.