Why players like relatively-unknown #RSPO matter to global climate

Last week, with relatively little fanfare, members of the world’s largest certification scheme for palm oil, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), voted to strengthen its sustainability standard. Palm oil – despite being the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet – and its certifier, the RSPO, are both still relatively obscure. But in the wake of the landmark report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in the weeks leading up to this year’s COP24, the actions by smaller players like the RSPO take on greater significance, writes Rainforest Action Network Agribusiness Campaign Director Robin Averbeck.

Written by the world’s leading climate scientists, the IPCC report gave staggering findings: climate change is happening now, and we only have roughly 12 years left to avert the worst effects of it. There is a huge scale of action required to achieve the 1.5°C limit set by the Paris Agreement, reached at the COP21 in 2015. 'Natural disasters' like fires, floods, droughts, heat waves, food shortages, mass extinctions, and sea level rise will be serious with 1.5°C of warming, but much worse with 2°C warming or above. To achieve the amount of emissions reduction required, there must be a rapid decline in the use of fossil fuels, but keeping the world’s forests standing is equally important.

The palm oil industry, a leading driver of tropical rainforest deforestation and peatland conversion, is a significant contributor of global climate emissions. Left standing, forests and peatlands take carbon out of the atmosphere, removing nearly a third of our current carbon dioxide emissions. One of the three key themes at the upcoming COP24 will be how to achieve climate stability through CO2 absorption by forests and land. But when forests are cleared and peatlands are drained and burned to make way for palm oil plantations, what was an efficient carbon sink becomes a massive source of greater emissions.

The RSPO’s decision to strengthen its sustainability standard is an important first step. The vote comes as many have been questioning the RSPO’s relevance in the marketplace, as dozens of palm oil traders, financiers and major consumer goods brands have independently elected to go beyond the RSPO standard, which has been criticized as weak because it allowed for deforestation and has a poor track record of sanctioning members that violate the standard. The new certification is now in alignment with market expectations that palm oil companies will comply with ‘No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation’ (NDPE) production practices, but a strong standard is meaningless without enforcement.

The RSPO’s recent decision to not suspend Indofood, Indonesia’s largest food company, is evidence of the failures of the RSPO system. Indofood, and its RSPO ‘sustainably’ certified palm oil subsidiary, lack a sufficient NDPE policy, and have been caught both clearing carbon-rich peatlands in violation of Indonesian law while also systematically and illegally violating workers’ rights for over two years. A certification scheme which continues to allow bad actors who are driving climate change and labor exploitation to be certified and sold under a ‘sustainable’ label cannot last long.

As the IPCC report made all too clear, we’re running out of time to act on climate change. And as the regulator of an industry with an enormous impact on tropical rainforests, the RSPO must grow a backbone with it's newly revised standard and strongly enforce it without delay. Each fraction of a degree of global warming has life or death consequences, and given the importance that forest and peatlands play in regulating the global climate, it is no longer hyperbole to say that the fate of our world may rest in the decisions of relatively unknown actors like the RSPO.

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