Addressing environmental impacts of oil palm expansion in Liberia/Africa

油棕榈是潮湿热带地区最有价值的作物之一，主导着全球植物脂肪市场，并提供生物燃料。油棕榈树种植对全球粮食安全至关重要，并为数百万农民提供就业机会和收入，但雨林向油棕榈树单一种植的大规模转变也造成了环境的严重退化，改变了温室气体(温室气体)一氧化二氮、甲烷和二氧化碳的排放，进而影响全球气候。确定油棕榈树的建立和管理的环境后果，并测试减轻任何影响的策略，对于维持油棕榈树的食品安全和生计利益，同时减少生产的环境足迹至关重要。油棕榈树主要种植在印度尼西亚和马来西亚，是那里的引种物种，通常在大型工业种植园种植。然而，热带其他地方也种植油棕榈树，通常覆盖数十万公顷的土地。油棕榈油生产对环境的影响很可能在不同的种植地区有所不同，但在许多生产地区几乎没有可用的数据。由于劳动力成本上升，土地供应减少，以及东南亚环境立法的增加，大型油棕榈油公司越来越多地寻找替代增长地点。迫切需要研究在非东南亚产区建立和管理油棕榈树对环境的影响。西非是油棕榈树的故乡，已被确定为未来油棕榈树生产的热点。扩大种植既有当地人的传统方法，他们从低地雨林地区收获野生油棕榈树，也有大规模的工业公司。由于该地区人口增长和人均国内生产总值的增加，以及全球对棕榈油的需求增加，预计种植面积将增加。例如，在西非森林最稠密的国家利比里亚，油棕榈树的种植在过去20年里大幅增加，但只有一个项目正在调查增加种植对环境的影响，这是剑桥大学(UOC)和利比里亚金棕榈树公司(GVL)最近进行的一项大规模田间研究。虽然该项目正在收集广泛的生物数据，但温室气体排放量尚未测量。拟议的项目将在英国生态和水文中心(UKCEH)、利比里亚大学(UOL)和GVL之间建立一个新的长期研究伙伴关系，以量化油棕榈树种植对利比里亚温室气体排放的影响，包括种植园和热带雨林生态系统。利用由UOC和GVL牵头的既定实地研究，我们将使用静态小室来测量和比较利比里亚东南部三个土地使用系统的温室气体通量。其中包括雨林、种植野生油棕榈树的小农农场，以及工业油棕榈园。我们将把我们的温室气体通量数据与项目合作伙伴UOC之前收集的土壤物理和化学性质、作物产量、现有生物多样性和生态系统功能数据的测量结果结合起来，以全面了解土地利用变化如何影响利比里亚的生态条件和作物生产。我们将与西非各地的合作者网络合作，主办一次研讨会，传播东南亚以往可持续油棕榈树研究的成果，包括吸取的经验教训。根据研讨会期间进行的对话，我们将公布未来热带非洲，特别是西非土地管理研究方向的议程。成果将促进未来的合作研究倡议。

Oil palm is one of the most valuable crops in the humid tropics, dominating the global vegetable fat market and providing biofuel. Oil palm cultivation is essential to global food security and provides jobs and income to millions of farmers, but large-scale conversion of rainforest to oil palm monoculture has also caused substantial environmental degradation and altered the emissions of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide, which in turn affects the global climate. Identifying the environmental consequences of oil palm establishment and management, and testing strategies to mitigate any impacts, is essential to maintaining oil palm's food security and livelihoods benefits while reducing the environmental footprints of production.Oil palm is principally grown in Indonesia and Malaysia, where it is an introduced species and commonly cultivated in large-scale industrial plantations. However, oil palm is also grown elsewhere in the tropics, often covering hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. It is likely that the environmental impacts of oil palm production differ across growth regions, yet few data are available in many producing regions. Owing to rising labour costs, reduced land availability, and increasing environmental legislation in Southeast Asia, large-scale oil palm corporations are increasingly looking for alternative growth locations. Research is urgently needed to identify the environmental impacts of oil palm establishment and management in non-Southeast Asia producing regions.West Africa, oil palm's native home, has been identified as a future hotspot for oil palm production. Expanded cultivation is driven by both local people, who practice traditional methods of harvesting wild-growing oil palms from areas of lowland rainforest, and large-scale industrial corporations. The cultivated area is predicted to increase owing to population growth and increases in per capita GDP in the region, and heightened demand for palm oil globally. For instance, in Liberia, the most densely-forested country in West Africa, oil palm expansion has increased substantially over the last twenty years, yet only one project, a recent large-scale field study between the University of Cambridge (UoC) and Golden Veroleum Liberia ('GVL', the largest oil palm producer nationwide), is investigating the environmental impacts of increased cultivation. While the project is collecting a wide range of biological data, GHG emissions have yet to be measured.The proposed project will establish a new, long-term research partnership between the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), University of Liberia (UoL), and GVL to quantify the impacts of oil palm cultivation on GHG emissions in Liberia including plantations and rainforest ecosystems. Capitalising on the established field study led by UoC and GVL, we will use static chambers to measure and compare GHG fluxes across three land-use systems in Southeast Liberia. These include rainforest, smallholder farms with wild-growing oil palms, and industrial oil palm plantations. We will couple our GHG flux data with measurements of soil physical and chemical properties, crop yields, and existing biodiversity and ecosystem function data collected previously by project partner UoC, to provide a holistic understanding of how land-use change affects ecological conditions and crop production in Liberia. Working with a network of collaborators based across West Africa, we will host a workshop to disseminate results from previous sustainable oil palm research in Southeast Asia, including lessons learnt. Informed by conversations held during our workshop, we will publish an agenda for future directions for land management research across tropical Africa, and West Africa specifically. Outcomes will facilitate future collaborative research initiatives.