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How does Indonesia’s palm oil industry fuel the climate crisis?

Booming global demand for the vegetable oil is spurring deforestation in Indonesia. Indonesia accounts for more than half of the global palm oil supply, the world’s most widely used vegetable oil that is found in everything from food to cosmetics to fuel.

But environmentalists fear surging demand for the product may drive mass deforestation in Indonesia, home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest, and exacerbate the global climate crisis.

Nature’s Hidden Wealth: Conservation’s Opportunity

Animals and plants constitute a very small part of our native biodiversity (roughly 5%). The vast majority – fungi, bacteria and the enormous diversity of other microscopic organisms, including invertebrates – is a massive, largely unexplored economic resource.

The best known examples of commercial uses for biodiversity are the thousands of drugs secreted by bacteria and fungi. But others are examples of what is known as “bio-inspiration” and “bio-mimicry”, where wild species provide the blueprints for products. The combination of nature and biotechnology can offer us all a tentative reason to hope for the future.