A study of the serious conflicts between oil palm expansion and biodiversity conservation using high-resolution remote sensing

Sustainable oil palm production is a key issue in global biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. As one of the world’s major vegetable oil crops, oil palm has expanded exponentially to meet increased demand over the past decades. However, previous monitoring and assessments of oil palm plantations were hampered because of the lack of high-resolution annual maps at the global scale. We produced annual oil palm plantation maps in 4 major producer countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea) in Asia-Pacific from 2007 to 2018 at 100-m resolution using advanced remote sensing techniques with Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. We uncover the global patterns of oil palm expansion and find that global oil palm expansion has a very high degree of potential conflict with local biodiversity. Globally, 99.9% of oil palm plantations overlapped with Conservation Priority Zones (CPZs) and oil palm plantations encroached on 231 protected areas. We suggest to incorporate the related issues into the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.