It may seem counter-intuitive that vegetable oil as a biofuel could be hurting the planet. Using biofuel instead of coal, diesel, or petroleum sounds like a step toward a more environmentally conscious future, right? This may not be the case with palm tree oil, especially not in countries like Indonesia.

Indonesia is one of the most bio-diverse countries in the world; it makes up less than 1% of global land area but contains over 10% of the world’s plant species, 12% of mammal species, and 17% of bird species. The country has a humid tropical climate which naturally supports millions of acres of rainforest, mangroves, and marshlands. But this warm, wet, weather is also the perfect place to grow oil-palm trees. They are much like the trees found on sandy island beaches, but oil-palm trees rapidly produce small nuts that generate a high yield of palm oil. This oil is used in everything from lipstick to ice cream to car fuel, and has become an increasingly popular as a power source since the United States government mandated its inclusion in many biofuel blends almost a decade ago. The intent was to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions by promoting palm oil products to reduce our required imports of foreign gasoline. But the legislation neglected to fully weigh the externalities of this shift in favor and how they would decimate forests in Indonesia, where palm oil is harvested from plantations that are decimating wildlife.

As of 2017 Indonesia 135 endangered mammal species more than any other nation in the world. Animals such as the Sumatran tiger, Tapanuli orangutan, Sumatran elephant, and Javan rhinoceros, are all critically endangered and are rapidly losing their habitats to palm oil plantation development. The loss keystone species such as these may have catastrophic results on Indonesian ecosystems, citizens, and global relations. In the last 22 years, Indonesia has lost more than 30 million acres of forest to palm oil plantation developments on the island of Sumatra alone. On average, every 25 seconds, a football field’s worth of jungle is destroyed for capitalist developments such as plantations.

Reliance on the palm oil industry by western countries like the United States has hurt the environment in multiple ways. The destruction of millions of acres of forest has threatened biodiversity and wildlife in Indonesia, and will have massive global repercussions. The clearing of rainforest to establish palm plantations is often done by setting large and unpredictable fires which have released millions of tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere. The accelerated destruction of Indonesian rainforests being cleared for plantations has created the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millennia. Indonesia is now the world’s 4^th largest source of annual carbon emissions, producing more CO₂ in 2015 than the entire continent of Europe. This stark increase in greenhouse gas emissions threatens to further accelerate climate change and the life-threatening effects it will have on not just on Indonesia, but the entire world.

The United Nations has deemed the crisis in Indonesia to be a “conservation emergency” and therefore, a solution that is politically, economically, and environmentally informed must be proposed to protect this nation’s wildlife. The Indonesian government must take action to mitigate the destruction of forests and severely threatened wildlife through stronger legislation. This includes more stringent review of new plantation development and expansion proposals that seek to clear more forested land. Additionally, the government needs to fund reforestation efforts and nongovernmental conservation groups, such as ProFauna or the Rainforest Action Network, that are already active in Indonesia working to save endangered species and their habitats. Finally, the Indonesian government should diversify their exports to decrease reliance on palm oil and invest in establishing ecotourism as a source of revenue. This will serve to reinforce the value of the natural forests and biodiversity as their preservation will provide a direct source of income for indigenous people, and the nation as a whole. Global capitalist markets that are so heavily dependent on palm oil, must invest in the search for alternatives that are truly environmentally conscious and must involve conservationists and scientists in this research. If stakeholders fail to protect biodiversity in Indonesia and the world’s climate health, palm oil may play a damning role in the future of our planet.