Agriculture and Environment: Palm Oil

Environmental Impacts of Production: Burning & Air Pollution

The establishment of oil palm plantations in Indonesia and to some extent Malaysia has been cited as the major cause of the air pollution that affected many non-producing areas of Southeast Asia including Singapore and other cities in 1997.

The smoke was so bad that airports were closed for days at a time. Once started, many of the fires in peat forests burned uncontrolled both underground and above ground for months.

1997 - the year with max CO₂ emissions
A recent letter published in Nature presented research that suggested that the 1997 fires were one of the main sources of CO₂ emissions globally in a year that had more emissions than any other on record since record keeping started in 1957 (Page et al. 2002).

0.81 to 2.57 gigatons of carbon released!
The authors estimate that the Indonesian fires released 0.81-2.57 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. This represents 13-40% of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

Still common practice
While this practice of burning has since been outlawed in Malaysia and Indonesia, it is still common in other parts of the world where plantation establishment is now occurring.