A plan to count what is left standing inside palm oil estates

The world has promised to protect 30 per cent of its land and sea by 2030. The arithmetic is not close: parks and reserves now cover about 17.6 per cent of land that matters for wildlife and 8.4 per cent of the sea, while farming takes up nearly 40 per cent of the habitable land. So the fight has to move onto farmland, argues Mohd Yunus in Fulcrum, the commentary site of Singapore's ISEAS institute. Indonesia and Malaysia grow about 85 per cent of the world's palm oil, which makes what survives inside their estates a global question. Yunus manages biodiversity work at the RSPO, the body that certifies palm oil as sustainable, and his plan runs through certification, so read it with that in mind.

The idea has a clumsy name, OECM, short for other effective area-based conservation measures. It means land outside a national park that still does a park's job, and it can be counted toward a country's targets. Yunus wants governments to recognise the pieces of nature kept inside plantations: rivers with their tree buffers left alone, peat kept wet, forest patches held between planted blocks. He attaches conditions. A fixed cut-off date, so nobody clears forest first and then claims credit for the leftovers, plus boundaries checked by satellite, recognition phased in over years, and independent audits. Certified growers, he says, already hold 27,825 hectares of conserved peatland and more than 172,000 hectares of riparian buffer, the strip of trees along a riverbank.

The part that lands in Indonesia is money. Nearly half of Southeast Asia's palm oil comes from smallholders, who cannot pay for the kind of audit a large company treats as routine. His answer is group certification through national schemes, and he names ISPO, Indonesia's own certification system, as the way to do it without a full corporate audit for every farmer. He also wants state-backed loans that come with a conservation condition attached, and a shared standard agreed through ASEAN and the producing countries' council, so the region writes these rules instead of receiving them.

Why it matters

If you farm a few hectares of oil palm, this decides whether the trees along your river are dead weight or something a lender and a buyer will pay you to keep. The thing to watch is whether ISPO actually opens a cheap group route, because a good rule that costs a smallholder a private auditor is the same as no rule. There is a harder test coming too: after a fire season like this one, any claim that estates double as conservation land will be measured against the ground that burned.