David Gaveau shows how our global consumption of palm oil and paper impacted Borneo’s forests
Channel: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Date: 06/04/2017

No-one wants the food we are eating or paper we write on to be the reasons of forest destruction because they contain palm oil or pulp sourced from deforested lands. Linked with goals to become responsible consumers and producers of palm oil (and paper), we developed this online platform (http://www.cifor.org/map/atlas) to track plantation companies’ deforestation footprint. 

Borneo feeds the world with palm oil, which everywhere in cosmetics, processed food and biofuels. Borneo is also a major center for pulp & paper production. It has one of the largest deforestation rates in the world.

As oil palm (and pulpwood) companies are promising to clean up their supply chain by halting deforestation, we need to be watchdogs, to make sure that things are going the way they are. Europe and Indonesia are drafting new trade agreements for more sustainable palm oil, and need tracking systems to monitor the supply chain.

At CIFOR, we develop geographic systems, online maps to bring professionals and consumers the information and evidence they need to verify whether companies clean up, because we need to make sure that companies are accountable and conform to more sustainable practices.

This atlas (http://www.cifor.org/map/atlas) offers a significant opportunity to investigate to what extent over 100 plantation companies of oil palm and pulpwood practiced deforestation in Borneo, and to what extent they avoided deforestation by planting on lands cleared for other reasons. It is interactive, and we tried to render good viewing of maps.

It is an open platform for companies, governments, educators, researchers, advocacy groups, journalists and anyone interested in deforestation and in tracking corporate actions.

If you are an NGO if you are a company executive, a teacher, or person with power use this Atlas to find out where and when deforestation has happened over the last four decades on Borneo and reveal how our global consumption of palm oil and paper impacted Borneo’s forests.