Palm oil’s ecological footprint extends to distant forests, study finds
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/palm-oils-ecological-footprint-extends-to-distant-forests-study-finds
Palm oil, a leading driver of tropical deforestation, may be also wreaking enormous damage on forests well outside established plantation areas, a new study has found.
The study, published Dec. 20 in Nature Communications, focuses on two decades’ worth of ecological data from Malaysia’s Pasoh Research Forest, a 6-square-kilometer (2.3-square-mile) patch of protected primary rainforest surrounded by oil palm plantations. It found that the forest had been heavily degraded, with the number of understory vegetation — small trees and shrubs that grow between the forest canopy and forest floor — declining by more than 50 percent over the period studied.
