SPOP

The cultivation of oil palm has become emblematic of the trade-off between development and conservation that agricultural commodities have to face: matching an increasing global demand while preserving the capacity of land to provide ecosystems services. In particular, oil palm development in South-East Asia has been and is still mainly happening at the expense of natural forests. Local productions are tightly connected to more global socio-economic and environmental issues. Rationale: We, the scientific community, need to better assess, through the improvement of both knowledge and tools, the 3D impacts (social-economic-environmental) of oil palm cropping systems (focus here on plantations, not mills or other parts of commodity chain) in order to reinforce the decision making process towards sustainable palm oil production (here with the help of land use modeling at the territory scale and scenario testing) and preserve natural forests from further expansion of plantations at their expense. Background: What do we already know about sustainable palm oil (RSPO) and what is actually missing? There is a lack of both knowledge and appropriate toolkit to assess major 3D impacts, especially while considering the local specificity of cropping systems and their capacity to adapt to more global changes. The project is aimed at fulfilling part of this gap focusing on oil palm plantations, some selected indicators for the three dimensions of sustainability, and the landscape scale (in particular, we do not consider here any indirect land use change), mostly in Indonesia and partly in Cameroon. Questions to research: How to better assess the 3D impacts of oil palm, plus make sure that new knowledge and toolkit will effectively be useful and finally adopted by end users? The objectives of the project are: i) to investigate the influence of global changes on the various oil palm cropping systems, ii) to identify the obstacles, opportunities, and uncertainties for the adaptation of these systems to global constraints, and iii) to elaborate strategies and tools designed to facilitate the transition towards sustainable oil palm cropping systems. In order to reach these objectives the SPOP Project will follow three main lines: 1) providing new scientific-based knowledge and tools in order to assess the 3D impacts of the oil palm cropping systems, allowing to confirm the sustainability of existing systems or to implement new sustainable systems; 2) involving stakeholders in the process by using participative methods all along the project such as multi-agent modeling, reflexives, or participatory prospective analysis; 3) identifying the obstacles and analyze whether they are related to some inherent incapacity of cropping systems to adapt or/and to some insufficient effort or success in making knowledge and tools accessible to the stakeholders. Expected outputs will include new knowledge and data on the 3D impacts of global constraints on oil palm plantations, innovative tools to assess these impacts and support decision making processes and recommendations for the transition of cropping systems towards sustainability.