C anadians might be concentrating on the oil sands and pipelines as world leaders prepare to gather at the United Nations’ climate change conference in Paris next month.
However, more global attention might be directed to deforestation and particularly the role of palm oil production in greenhouse gas production.
Palm oil and soybean oil are the big players in the vegetable oil sector, dwarfing canola oil.
Palm is produced on plantations, and Indonesia is the largest producer, followed by Malaysia. Together they account for 85 percent of production.
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This fall’s strong El Nino caused a drought in Indonesia that has exacerbated the damage caused by the annual forest fire season.
The fires are not a natural occurrence. Historically, much of Indonesia was covered by a tropical forest growing in moist peat soil.
However, for decades the forests have been under intense pressure as companies drained the peat lands and planted palm oil plantations and fast growing trees for pulp wood.
Many fires are set deliberately to clear land for palm production. This year’s extra dry conditions have caused them to get wildly out of hand. Fires in the peat are exceptionally difficult to put out.
Reeking, dense smoke from the fires have become a regional issue as Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines complain about respiratory issues, closed schools and cancelled airline flights.
The fires generated 1.35 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, which is as much as Japan produces in a year, according to calculations by Guido van der Werf, a researcher at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
On dozens of occasions, Indonesia was producing more daily emissions than the United States, which has an economy 20 times larger than Indonesia’s
Setting fires is illegal, but enforcement is lax. The finger of blame for the fires seems to point in all directions: big corporate producers, small peasant landowners and corrupt government officials.
The Indonesian Palm Oil Farmers Association, under pressure from environmentalists and international snack food companies that are big users of palm oil, has instituted a zero-burn, no-deforestation policy. However, it has had little effect this year, and the small producers that supply palm fruit to the big companies complain they can’t meet the new environmental standards.
Indonesia has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent below the “business as usual” projection for 2030. In other words, emissions would increase but not as fast as they would if nothing was done to curb them.
They say they could achieve better results if they had international assistance.
This one situation shows that addressing climate change in-volves a lot more than stopping a pipeline or installing a low energy light bulb.
It is complicated and complex but necessary if we are to avoid even worse climate disruptions such as the strong El Nino this year that contributed to the Indonesian fires.
