Impact of Malaysian palm oil on sustainable development goals: co-benefits and trade-offs across mitigation strategies.

Palm oil (PO) is an important source of livelihood, but unsustainable practices and widespread consumption may threaten human and planetary health. We reviewed 234 articles and summarized evidence on the impact of PO on health, social and economic aspects, environment, and biodiversity in the Malaysian context, and discuss mitigation strategies based on the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The evidence on health impact of PO is equivocal, with knowledge gaps on whether moderate consumption elevates risk for chronic diseases, but the benefits of phytonutrients (SDG2) and sensory characteristics of PO seem offset by its high proportion of saturated fat (SDG3). While PO contributes to economic growth (SDG9, 12), poverty alleviation (SDG1, 8, 10), enhanced food security (SDG2), alternative energy (SDG9), and long-term employment opportunities (SDG1), human rights issues and inequities attributed to PO production persist (SDG8). Environmental impacts arise through large-scale expansion of monoculture plantations associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions (SDG13), especially from converted carbon-rich peat lands, which can cause forest fires and annual trans-boundary haze; changes in microclimate properties and soil nutrient content (SDG6, 13); increased sedimentation and change of hydrological properties of streams near slopes (SDG6); and increased human wildlife conflicts, increase of invasive species occurrence, and reduced biodiversity (SDG14, 15). Practices such as biological pest control, circular waste management, multi-cropping and certification may mitigate negative impacts on environmental SDGs, without hampering progress of socioeconomic SDGs. While strategies focusing on improving practices within and surrounding plantations offer co-benefits for socioeconomic, environment and biodiversity-related SDGs, several challenges in achieving scalable solutions must be addressed to ensure holistic sustainability of PO in Malaysia for various stakeholders. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01052-4.

Sustainable Transformation of Land-Based Economic Development in the Era of Digital Revolution.

Biotechnology will play a key role in transforming current land-use systems alongside the digital revolution by using five strategies: enhancing productivity at the farm or plantation level, replenishing degraded land, enabling landscape management for resilience, upgrading and diversifying downstream activities, and creating new value propositions.

Linking carbon stock change from land-use change to consumption of agricultural products: A review with Indonesian palm oil as a case study.

Numerous analyses have been performed to quantitatively link carbon stock change caused by land-use change (CSC-LUC) to consumption of agricultural products, but results differ significantly, even for studies focussing on the same region or product. This is due to the different focuses and interpretations of the links between direct drivers and underlying causes of CSC-LUC, which can be translated into differences in key functions, i.e. specific methods, algorithms and parameters embedded in the analysis. Using the example of Indonesian palm oil production (often associated with CSC-LUC), this paper carries out a meta-analysis of 12 existing studies, determines the different settings for the key functions embedded in consumption-based CSC-LUC studies and discussed their implications for policymaking. It identifies the underlying reasons of adopting different settings within the eight key functions and their advantages and trade-offs. Examples are the way of determining how deforestation is linked to oil palm, and the inclusion of non-agriculture and non-productive drivers in the accounting to weight their roles in CSC-LUC in comparison to palm oil consumption. Following that, the quantitative results from the selected studies were processed and harmonised in terms of unit, allocation mechanism, allocation key and amortisation period. This resulting in ranges of 0.1-3.8 and -0.1-15.7 tCO2/t crude palm oil for historical and projection studies, respectively. It was observed that CSC-LUC allocated to palm oil is typically lower when propagating effects and non-agricultural or non-productive drivers were accounted for. Values also greatly differ when marginal and average allocation mechanisms were employed. Conclusively, individual analyses only answer part of the question about CSC-LUC drivers and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Since the context can be very different, using quantitative results from a single study for accounting purposes in policymaking is not recommended. Instead, insights from different studies should be combined, e.g. the relative role of logging and oil palm or the contribution to CSC-LUC in regional and global perspectives.

Can We Get Rid of Palm Oil?

Concerns over the sustainability of palm oil have triggered debates about its role in a bio-based economy, but can we get rid of it? Although the quick answer is no, we should eliminate unsustainable land-use practices. However, currently, technical and financial support for land-users to adopt sustainable land-use practices in the cultivation of palm oil is largely missing.

Linking carbon stock change from land-use change to consumption of agricultural products: Alternative perspectives.

Agricultural expansion driven by growing demand has been a key driver for carbon stock change as a consequence of land-use change (CSC-LUC). However, its relative role compared to non-agricultural and non-productive drivers, as well as propagating effects were not clearly addressed. This study contributed to this subject by providing alternative perspectives in addressing these missing links. A method was developed to allocate historical CSC-LUC to agricultural expansions by land classes (products), trade, and end use. The analysis for 1995-2010 leads to three key trends: (i) agricultural land degradation and abandonment is found to be a major (albeit indirect) driver for CSC-LUC, (ii) CSC-LUC is spurred by the growth of cross-border trade, (iii) non-food use (excluding liquid biofuels) has emerged as a significant contributor of CSC-LUC in the 2000's. In addition, the study demonstrated that exact values of CSC-LUC at a single spatio-temporal point may change significantly with different methodological settings. For example, CSC-LUC allocated to 'permanent oil crops' changed from 0.53 Pg C (billion tonne C) of carbon stock gain to 0.11 Pg C of carbon stock loss when spatial boundaries were changed from global to regional. Instead of comparing exact values for accounting purpose, key messages for policymaking were drawn from the main trends. Firstly, climate change mitigation efforts pursued through a territorial perspective may ignore indirect effects elsewhere triggered through trade linkages. Policies targeting specific commodities or types of consumption are also unable to quantitatively address indirect CSC-LUC effects because the quantification changes with different arbitrary methodological settings. Instead, it is recommended that mobilising non-productive or under-utilised lands for productive use should be targeted as a key solution to avoid direct and indirect CSC-LUC.

Pretreatment of oil palm frond using hot compressed water: an evaluation of compositional changes and pulp digestibility using severity factors.

The influence of reaction temperature (160-200°C), residence time (45-90min), and liquid-solid ratio (8-16v/w) on oil palm frond (OPF) pre-treated with hot compressed water (HCW) was evaluated using severity factors. Effect of the process parameters studied on pulps composition and digestibility were found to be complex. The results revealed that digestibility could not be predicted merely according to composition. Severity factor was correlated with compositional changes and digestibility with good R-squared values at varied liquid-solid ratios (8-16v/w), but not with overall glucose yield. HCW pretreatment significantly improved the overall glucose yield up to 83.72% with severity of 3.31 and liquid-solid ratio of 8.0 compared to untreated raw OPF which only recorded an overall glucose yield of 30.97%. HCW is therefore an effective method for pretreatment of OPF for glucose recovery.

Hot compressed water pretreatment of oil palm fronds to enhance glucose recovery for production of second generation bio-ethanol.

This work presents the pretreatment of oil palm fronds (OPF) using hot compressed water (HCW) to enhance sugar recovery in enzymatic hydrolysis. A central, composite rotatable design was used to optimize the effect of reaction temperature, reaction time and liquid-solid ratio on the pretreatment process. All variables were found to significantly affect the glucose yield. A quadratic polynomial equation was used to model glucose yield by multiple regression analysis, using response surface methodology (RSM). Using a 10 bar pressurized reactor, the optimum conditions for pretreatment of OPF were found at 178 degrees C, 11.1 min and a liquid-solid ratio of 9.6. The predicted glucose yield was 92.78 wt.% at the optimum conditions. Experimental verification of the optimum conditions gave a glucose yield in good agreement with the estimated value of the model.

Bio-ethanol from lignocellulose: Status, perspectives and challenges in Malaysia.

The present study reveals the perspective and challenges of bio-ethanol production from lignocellulosic materials in Malaysia. Malaysia has a large quantity of lignocellulosic biomass from agriculture waste, forest residues and municipal solid waste. In this work, the current status in Malaysia was laconically elucidated, including an estimation of biomass availability with a total amount of 47,402 dry kton/year. Total capacity and domestic demand of second-generation bio-ethanol production in Malaysia were computed to be 26,161 ton/day and 6677 ton/day, respectively. Hence, it was proven that the country's energy demand can be fulfilled with bio-ethanol if lignocellulosic biomass were fully converted into bio-ethanol and 19% of the total CO(2) emissions in Malaysia could be avoided. Apart from that, an integrated national supply network was proposed together with the collection, storage and transportation of raw materials and products. Finally, challenges and obstacles in legal context and policies implementation were elaborated, as well as infrastructures shortage and technology availabilities.