Life cycle assessments of oil palm products

Quantifying environmental impact is becoming a requirement for agricultural commodity chains. Given the various pollution risks (e.g. eutrophication, global warming, ecotoxicity), and the opportunities to mitigate those risks (e.g. increasing nitrogen utilisation efficiency, nutrient recycling, carbon sequestration to reduce global warming), it is crucial to apply models and tools that allow for the identification of best practices in order to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. It is particularly crucial for increasingly important crops such as oil palm that may impact the environment both during cultivation and due to land use change (LUC) for new plantations.Over the last 20 years, the area of oil palm plantations has increased drastically. The total productive area reached 18.7Mha in 2014 compared with 7.5Mha in 1994, according to FAO1. This expansion was particularly remarkable in Indonesia and Malaysia, where the productive areas increased by a factor of two and seven, respectively, over the same time period1. Oil palms have the highest oil yield per hectare and palm oil can be used for various purposes. Given the growth of the world’s population and the consequent growing demand for food and fuel, the increase in oil palm production is expected to continue, albeit at a slower pace than over the last decade (OECD and FAO, 2013). This increase is also expected to extend to other developing or emerging countries in Africa and Latin America, where governments are promoting palm oil development in order to alleviate poverty and increase energy security (Pirker et al., 2016).Over the last decade, life cycle assessment (LCA) has become the worldwide standard for reporting environmental product declarations (ISO 14025 Type III Environmental Declarations) and the baseline model behind various greenhouse gas (GHG) calculators (BIOGRACE2, GREET3, CCaLC4) and GHG certification schemes (European Commission, 2009, BSI 2008, ISCC5). Initially developed in the 1980s to assess the environmental impact of industrial products and services, such as packaging, life cycle approaches were rapidly applied in increasingly diverse contexts urging for the development of harmonised guidelines. In the 2000s, the framework and methodological aspects of LCA were standardised through international norms (ISO 14040 series 2000–2006), particularly through the structuring and formalisation work led by SETAC6. LCA has been applied to agricultural commodities primarily for the purpose of assessing various environmental impacts and trade-offs, for example, bioenergy chains compared with fossil ones. Adaptation of the LCA framework to agricultural products requires scientific and methodological developments that are still ongoing and represent specific challenges for tropical perennial crops such as oil palm (Basset-Mens et al., 2010; Bessou et al., 2013; Bellon-Maurel et al., 2013).In this chapter, first we briefly present LCA modelling principles and methodological steps, and then review the results from published LCA and GHG assessments of palm oil products. Finally, we discuss the available information on the environmental impact of palm oil and remaining challenges regarding LCA development and applications to palm oil products.