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Minimize oil palm plantation expansion with game theory

Nature Sustainability volume 5, page 1002 (2022)Cite this article

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To the editor — Xu et al.1 recently estimated greenhouse gas emissions resulting from land-use change (LUC) in Indonesia and Malaysia to meet the growing demand for palm oil. Smallholder plantations were found to be more likely to encroach into carbon-rich ecosystems, thus generating more LUC emissions per unit of incremental output compared with industrial plantations. The implications of these results for policy development “targeting small-scale plantations to prevent oil palm expansion into high carbon stock forests” were discussed briefly1. Because cultivating other oil crops will just result in more LUC1,2, we discuss how their findings can be integrated into decision support models to enable a sustainable increase in palm oil production.

LUC emissions depend on the previous state of ecosystems as well as the plantation owners’ attitudes towards sustainability1,3. Decision support models based on mathematical programming have been developed to minimize LUC per increment of production capacity4,5. These models can help to determine strategies to maximize use of existing plantations to avoid the need for expansion. They provide a proof of concept on how plantation expansion can be rationalized to meet the world’s growing demand for vegetable oil within sustainable limits. The next generation of models should take into account the variations in the observed behaviour of plantation owners1. They also need to incorporate classification of forests to further limit expansion of plantations into areas with high carbon stock and biodiversity2,3,6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science, Swinburne University of Technology, Kuching, Malaysia

    V. Andiappan

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

    R. R. Tan

  3. School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Malaysia, Putrajaya, Malaysia

    D. K. S. Ng

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  1. V. Andiappan
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  2. R. R. Tan
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  3. D. K. S. Ng
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All authors contributed equally to conceptualizing and writing the paper.

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Correspondence to R. R. Tan.

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Andiappan, V., Tan, R.R. & Ng, D.K.S. Minimize oil palm plantation expansion with game theory. Nat Sustain 5, 1002 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00966-w

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