Riparian forest buffers increase yields from oil palm plantations
KOTA KINABALU: A new open access scientific paper was published last week in Earth’s Future on research carried out by Cardiff University’s School of Biosciences and School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Danau Girang Field Centre.
“Preserving tropical forest buffers along the margins of large meandering rivers can enhance the profitability of floodplain plantations while maintaining conservation benefits by reducing the area of land lost to the river through bank erosion,” explains Dr Alexander Horton from Cardiff School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and first author of the paper.
He said the increase is most evident in long-term economic projections [but] also holds true at shorter time scales, given the lagged productivity of newly established plantations.
By reducing initial planting expenditure and safeguarding young palms from being lost to erosion before they generate revenue, he said riparian buffers have the potential to increase the short-term profitability of newly established plantations.
Dr Benoit Goossens from Danau Girang Field Centre and Cardiff School of Biosciences, said in this research, they estimated the value of the ecosystem service that riparian forest buffers provide by protecting adjacent plantations from riverbank erosion.
“We find that riparian buffers of an order of tens of meters may enhance the longterm viability of floodplain plantations. Which means that accounting for geomorphic contributions to ecosystem services may help align palm oil industry goals with environmental conservation.
“We strongly suggest that oil palm plantations set aside riparian forest buffers of at least 100 meters wide along large rivers such as Kinabatangan, Segama, Paitan, Sugut, Kalumpang, Serudong and Silabukan; and we hope that the results of this research will be considered by RSPO and oil palm companies in Sabah and in the rest of the world,” added Goossens.