Future climate effects on suitability for growth of oil palms in Malaysia and Indonesia

Abstract

The production of palm oil (PO) is highly profitable. The economies of the principal producers, Malaysia and Indonesia, and others, benefit considerably. Climate change (CC) will most likely have an impact on the distribution of oil palms (OP) (Elaeis guineensis). Here we present modelled CC projections with respect to the suitability of growing OP, in Malaysia and Indonesia. A process-oriented niche model of OP was developed using CLIMEX to estimate its potential distribution under current and future climate scenarios. Two Global Climate Models (GCMs), CSIRO-Mk3.0 and MIROC-H, were used to explore the impacts of CC under the A1B and A2 scenarios for 2030, 2070 and 2100. Decreases in climatic suitability for OP in the region were gradual by 2030 but became more pronounced by 2100. These projections imply that OP growth will be affected severely by CC, with obvious implications to the economies of (a) Indonesia and Malaysia and (b) the PO industry, but with potential benefits towards reducing CC. A possible remedial action is to concentrate research on development of new varieties of OP that are less vulnerable to CC.

Climate change affecting oil palm agronomy, and oil palm cultivation increasing climate change, require amelioration

“…Increase in temperature and rainfall resulted in 41, 49, and 38 MYR/ha decrease for Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah, and Sarawak. These figures are without adaption and mitigation strategies being taken (Zainal et al., ) and are to some extent confirmed by decreases in suitable climate for OP growth during similar periods (Paterson et al., , ).…”

“…80 years considered in Paterson et al. (, ) in terms of the effect of CC on suitable climate for OP growth for example. Furthermore, OP plantations release more N 2 O into the atmosphere than forests, mainly from fertilizer use: Fires add black carbon, which increase global warming.…”

“…Further expansion into West Africa and Latin America creates a more secure production system in the longer term in the opinion of Murphy () and a doubling of palm oil production in the next decades is considered feasible from this expansion. However, these estimations of production do not take into account CC (Paterson et al., , ) which undermines these assessments, nor do they consider other negative consequences of OP development such as biodiversity loss (Fitzherbert et al., ) and most ecosystem functions (Dislich et al., ).…”

“…Climate change will have a profoundly negative effect on cultivation of OP, especially by 2100 (Paterson et al., , ). On the other hand, some ecological functions of OP plantations compared to forests have potentially irreversible global impacts such as reduction in gas and climate regulation (Dislich et al., ).…”

Tropical forest-transition landscapes: a portfolio for studying people, tree crops and agro-ecological change in context

“…From the literature, we selected four variables within the WorldClim data set specific to the commodity species to be modelled based on the importance within the climatic envelopes of the four commodities, according to the literature (Ovalle Paterson et al 2015;Ray et al 2015;Schroth et al, 2016) and personal communication with experts ( Table Supp2).…”