Is there such a thing as sustainable palm oil? Satellite images show protected rainforest on fire
A visual investigation by the NZZ shows the standards for certifying palm oil production as sustainable are often ignored. The consequences for millions of hectares of vulnerable rainforest could be catastrophic as the industry expands.
On September 14, 2019, the Sentinel-2 satellite flies over Indonesia, at an altitude of 700 kilometers. The satellite meticulously photographs the island state’s landscapes.
Down below, chaos reigns. From the edges of the vast palm oil plantations, fire eats into the surrounding rainforest. Smoke plumes extend for kilometers. Days pass before the flames are extinguished. By then, several hundred hectares of forest have been destroyed. That’s no accident: The freed-up area can now be used to cultivate oil palms.
Since the turn of the millennium, Indonesia has lost 27 million hectares of rainforest. That is about seven times the area of Switzerland. In the vast majority of cases, the cleared areas were converted into oil palm plantations.
The increasing appetite for palm oil worldwide is a big reason why virgin forests in Indonesia and elsewhere are being cleared on a massive scale. Palm oil production is increasing by about 10 percent each year. Palm oil is not only used in the production of foods such as cookies, Nutella spread and margarine. It can also be found in cosmetics, detergents and is used in the production of biodiesel. More than half of the palm oil traded worldwide comes from Indonesia. In 2018, that included 40 million tons, out of a total of 70 million tons produced.
To address excessive logging and illegal burning, non-governmental organizations have created certification programs. They are intended to show consumers when a product comes from sustainable palm oil cultivation – and when it does not. The free trade agreement Indonesia and Switzerland adopted in March also relies on such labels to certify imported palm oil. The best known of these is the «Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil,» or RSPO for short, which was initiated by the environmental group World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) in 2004. In Switzerland, there are now 86 companies that purchase palm oil certified as sustainable by the RSPO.
Just over a fifth of palm oil concessions in Indonesia, meanwhile, belong to RSPO members. There are plantations on the concession areas, but also forests that have yet to be cleared and areas that must be preserved as nature reserves. Eighty percent of RSPO concessions are fully certified at the moment.
Certified concessions and those wishing to be certified must meet a long list of criteria. The three most important rules for ecosystem protection are:
- Slash-and-burn agriculture is prohibited, as is managing fields with fire. For example, burning to remove old oil palms is not allowed.
- Damage to, and the clearing of, virgin rainforest is prohibited.
- New plantations may not be planted on peat. Peat-rich soil must be protected on existing plantations.
However, even after almost two decades, the RSPO has not succeeded in consistently implementing the three standards mentioned above. Images and data from the Sentinel-2 and other satellites mentioned at the beginning of this article make this clear.
The NZZ has used several cases to highlight where slash-and-burn techniques continue on RSPO-certified land, and where new plantations are threatening important ecosystems. These examples are representative of the huge gap between the need for environmental protection and the ever-increasing global demand for palm oil.
Table of Contents
1. Fires on palm oil concessions: Where there's fire, there's not always an arsonist
Over 400,000 fire hotspots were detected by NASA satellites in Indonesia in 2019. If you combine these points with palm oil concession data, you can see where RSPO plantations have burned. Satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 also provides the first clues as to who may have set the fires.
For example, in 2019, there was a particularly bad fire on Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. In the province of West Kalimantan, there is a concession owned by palm oil dealer Austindo Nusantara Jaya (ANJ). ANJ is one of the ten largest palm oil concerns in Indonesia. This particular concession was awarded a RSPO sustainability certificate in November 2019. NASA satellite data clearly shows: The certification was granted despite repeated outbreaks of fire on, or right next to, its palm oil concession there.
In an article on its website, the company claims the fires started outside its concession – namely, in spots where other, non-RSPO members manage the forest. ANJ says it was only thanks to the efforts of a specially-trained fire brigade that the company was able to prevent major damage to the plantations.
This can now be verified by an analysis of satellite images. Infrared images, which show burnt vegetation especially well, are particularly suitable for this purpose. In fact, the fires appear to have started outside the plantations and then spread to the RSPO member's concession area.
A standard RSPO inspection of the plantation in 2020 found traces of fire, but also concluded that ANJ had not set the fire, but had fought it. Their case was helped by the fact that the fire had destroyed oil palms, and not uncleared forest.
This example shows how satellite data can be used to investigate fires. In this case, the data support the palm oil producer's claims. But this is not always the case.
2. The fires on the Bumitama Group’s plantations
Not far away is a concession belonging to the Bumitama Group, a company that also supplies the Swiss food giant Nestlé. Bumitama has been an RSPO member since 2013, and operates over 30 land concessions on Indonesia. The concession investigated by the NZZ has not yet been certified. Nevertheless, according to the RSPO, the fire ban must also be observed on land concessions awaiting certification.
In 2019, there was also a big fire on this concession. Unlike the case above, the infrared imagery here clearly indicates that the fire started within the concession boundaries. The fire raged for about a month, and destroyed over 800 hectares of forest.
What is striking is that the fires spread exactly where a so-called conservation area was identified in a 2019 assessment. It is therefore considered an important refuge for the endangered Bornean orangutan.
The Bumitama Group denies any responsibility. The fires, they insist, were set illegally by unknown third parties. It’s hard to prove otherwise. In response to an inquiry from the NZZ, the RSPO acknowledges: «The biggest challenge is proving that members actually violated our rules.»
The RSPO monitors members' plantations using satellite data, but only requires them to explain the cause of the fire if a blaze is observed over five subsequent days. Why there was no investigation into the Bumitama plantation blaze, despite several weeks of fires, remains unclear.
3. Concessions on former peat forests: Elaborate origin stories
The reason for the large, long-lasting fires in West Kalimantan is that many of the concessions there are located on former peat forests. These once-wet landscapes were drained to plant palm oil trees, and are now particularly vulnerable to fire. Peat forests are not only valuable ecosystems, they can absorb many times more carbon dioxide than other types of forest. All that CO2 is released into the air during fires. In dry years, like 2015 and 2019, Indonesia is therefore one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world.
In order to reduce CO2 emissions, RSPO has banned new plantations on peat since 2018. Existing plantations can be maintained, but according to RSPO rules they must be managed in such a way that no fires break out. On the RSPO-certified plantations of both the ANJ company and the Bumitama Group, this has not been accomplished. This is demonstrated by the following images, which show peatlands in addition to fire hotspots detected by NASA.
Peatlands are also protected under Indonesian law. Nevertheless, palm oil plantations are often established in these areas, then later awarded an RSPO certificate. The environmental protection organization Greenpeace refers to this as «concession laundering,» a reference to money laundering.
For example, according to a Greenpeace investigation, the Bumitama concession mentioned above was originally founded by two businessmen. The pair had no connection, at least on paper, with the Bumitama Group. They drained the peat forest and then obtained the necessary building permits from the government. Only then was the plantation officially purchased by Bumitama. The latter now plans to have the concession certified by RPSO by 2024.
4. Palm oil from Papua: Plantations in the deep, untouched jungle
A good 1,500 kilometers east of Borneo lies the island of Papua. It is home to the third-largest contiguous rainforest in the world, large parts of which remain intact and are not managed by anyone — so-called primary forest.
Papua has, so far, largely been spared by the palm oil industry. But the increasing demand for palm oil threatens the island’s unspoiled nature. RSPO members now have 15 concessions located on Papua. Yet the RSPO banned the construction of new plantations on primary forest in 2010. How is it that they’re still being established?
Again, a look at ANJ's concessions will help. At the end of 2013, the company — by then an RSPO member for six years already — begins clearing the forest on two of its three concessions in West Papua. Although official Indonesian government data shows that there is primary forest on the concessions, an expert report submitted as part of the application concludes that the areas do not contain any forest worth protecting. ANJ therefore proceeded to clear the forest.
On several occasions, non-governmental organizations pointed out to RSPO that primary forest was being cleared on the concessions. A newly formed RSPO Investigation and Monitoring Unit only takes up the case in 2018. Shortly thereafter, they demanded that ANJ immediately halt development of the plantations on Papua and conduct further environmental impact assessments. Since Nov. 29, 2019, operations on the island have been at a standstill. ANJ is still a member of the RSPO.
5. How useful is the RSPO label?
The examples highlighted show: RSPO rules are violated while the offending producers remain part of the program. That's why Johanna Michel, deputy executive director of the Bruno Manser Fonds, criticizes the sustainability label. «It often takes years for RSPO members to lose the seal of approval,» she says. «The reinstatement of an expelled member, on the other hand, can happen in just a few months.»
The Bruno Manser Fonds is a Swiss environmental organization that works to preserve the rainforest. It is one of the few non-governmental organizations to speak out clearly against Switzerland's free trade agreement with Indonesia. This is despite the fact that, for the first time in Switzerland's history, a trade treaty includes a sustainability clause. Michel says: «To me, the label seems like a greenwashing scheme for the European market.»
The sticking point for the sustainability label: Is it even possible to check whether rules are being observed, and then punish infractions? There is often a lack of resources for comprehensive monitoring and enforcement. RSPO acknowledges the problem. «At the same time, we must recognize the tremendous progress that has been made in terms of the production and use of sustainable palm oil,» a spokesman for the organization counters.
Andika Putraditama of the World Resources Institute agrees. The Global Research Institute helps RSPO make the concession boundaries of RSPO-certified plantations publicly available. It is only because these can be viewed that infractions are visible at all. Most palm oil producers, who are not RSPO members, operate completely off the radar. «The great majority of palm oil companies operating in Indonesia are not bound by transparency and accountability,» Putraditama says. «You often can't even find them on a public map.»
Thanks to publicly-available satellite images and concession boundaries, the media and NGOs can check whether the plantation owners are complying with the RSPO rules — or not. And their research clearly shows there is still a long way to go before palm oil — a substance that has become an integral part of so many consumers' daily lives — can be grown sustainably on a truly large scale.
Is there such a thing as sustainable palm oil from Indonesia? An NZZ visual investigation shows that even certified plantations often do not deliver on their promises.
Research: Adina Renner, Conradin Zellweger. Graphic: Adina Renner. Text: Barnaby Skinner. Editorial: Patrick Zoll. Other inputs: Gilles Steinmann, Jonas Oesch, Anja Lemcke. English translation: Andrew Curry.
Short explanation of the data sets used in the investigation:
RSPO plantations: The concession areas of RSPO members can be viewed on an interactive map on the RSPO website. However, the data for Indonesia are not available to download. For this research, we therefore downloaded the data directly from the map using a script.
Palm oil concessions, protected areas, primary rainforest, peatlands, forest cover, forest loss: These data sets are from different vendors. They can be viewed on the interactive map of Global Forest Watch and can also be obtained there.
Fire hotspots: The fire data came from NASA. The data is calculated on the basis of images from the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) satellite.
Satellite imagery: All satellite images were obtained from the Sentinel Hub EO Browser. Among them are images from the Sentinel-2 satellite (European Space Agency) as well as the Landsat-8 satellite (NASA).
The NZZ is one of the preeminent news sources in the German-speaking world, with a tradition of independent, high-quality journalism reaching back over 240 years.
«NZZ in English» will help you gain a new global perspective with selected English-language articles on international news, politics, business, technology, and society.
This test phase will help us evaluate whether «NZZ in English» should be continued and expanded. During the test phase, you have access to all English-language content free of charge. Please help us improve our product by sending feedback to innovation@nzz.ch.
Follow @NZZenglish on Twitter to get the latest articles in English.
