2011 Articles
High-yield oil palm expansion spares land at the expense of forests in the Peruvian Amazon
High-yield agriculture potentially reduces pressure on forests by requiring less land to increase production. Using satellite and field data, we assessed the area deforested by industrial-scale high-yield oil palm expansion in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010, finding that 72% of new plantations expanded into forested areas. In a focus area in the Ucayali region, we assessed deforestation for high- and smallholder low-yield oil palm plantations. Low-yield plantations accounted for most expansion overall (80%), but only 30% of their expansion involved forest conversion, contrasting with 75% for high-yield expansion. High-yield expansion minimized the total area required to achieve production but counter-intuitively at higher expense to forests than low-yield plantations. The results show that high-yield agriculture is an important but insufficient strategy to reduce pressure on forests. We suggest that high-yield agriculture can be effective in sparing forests only if coupled with incentives for agricultural expansion into already cleared lands.
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Also Published In
- Title
- Environmental Research Letters
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044029
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Center for Environmental Sustainability
- Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
- International Research Institute for Climate and Society
- Publisher
- IOP Science
- Published Here
- November 10, 2014