Lim, F.K.S. orcid.org/0000-0003-1227-460X, Carrasco, L.R. orcid.org/0000-0002-2894-1473, Edwards, D.P. orcid.org/0000-0001-8562-3853 et al. (1 more author) (2024) Market responses to oil palm intensification could exacerbate deforestation in Indonesia. Conservation Biology, 38 (1). e14149. ISSN 0888-8892
Abstract
Oil palm is a major driver of tropical deforestation. A key intervention proposed to reduce the footprint of oil palm is intensifying production to free up spare land for nature, yet the indirect land-use implications of intensification through market forces are poorly understood. We used a spatially explicit land-rent modeling framework to characterize the supply and demand of oil palm in Indonesia under multiple yield improvement and demand elasticity scenarios and explored how shifts in market equilibria alter projections of crop expansion. Oil palm supply was sensitive to crop prices and yield improvements. Across all our scenarios, intensification raised agricultural rents and lowered the effectiveness of reductions in crop expansion. Increased yields lowered oil palm prices, but these price-drops were not sufficient to prevent further cropland expansion from increased agricultural rents under a range of price elasticities of demand. Crucially, we found that agricultural intensification might only result in land being spared when the demand relationship was highly inelastic and crop prices were very low (i.e., a 70% price reduction). Under this scenario, the extent of land spared (∼0.32 million ha) was countered by the continued establishment of new plantations (∼1.04 million ha). Oil palm intensification in Indonesia could exacerbate current pressures on its imperiled biodiversity and should be deployed with stronger spatial planning and enforcement to prevent further cropland expansion.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
Keywords: | Elaeis guineensis; agricultural expansion; equilibria analysis; market feedbacks; partial-equilibrium model; price elasticities; rebound effect |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Economics (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 02 Oct 2023 09:50 |
Last Modified: | 25 Oct 2024 14:08 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/cobi.14149 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:203829 |