New Study on Sustainability Revealed the Harms of Vegetable Oil Emissions

The quantity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by vegetable oil production has been exposed in new worldwide research, stressing the need for more sustainable growing alternatives.

GHG emissions from practically all feasible methods now utilized to generate palm, soybean, rapeseed, and sunflower oil worldwide were examined for the first time by scientists from the University of Nottingham's Future Food Beacon. The research was a meta-analysis that included all relevant papers published between 2000 and 2020 on the environmental effect of oil extraction. The findings were published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Oil Research

This new research represents over 6,000 producers in 38 nations, accounting for more than 71% of worldwide vegetable oil output. GHG emissions were 3.81 kg CO2e per kilogram of refined oil across all oil crop systems. Crop-specific median CO2e emissions per kilogram of refined oil varied from 2.49 kg CO2e for rapeseed oil to 4.25 kg CO2e for soybean oil.

Despite receiving more unfavorable attention, median emissions from soybean oil were greater than those from palm oil. However, median rapeseed and sunflower oil systems produced fewer emissions than palm and soybean oil, indicating more environmentally friendly options.

Harms

When a forest is cleared to make way for agriculture, the carbon stored in the trees and flora is released as CO2. A significant amount of carbon contained in the soil is frequently released. The researchers studied the influence of this form of deforestation on agricultural sustainability. They also considered the carbon costs of agricultural land occupancy, even when deforestation occurred more than a century ago (as is likely the case for most of Europe). This is because, even if no land-use change carbon is released today due to utilizing the land for agriculture, the chance to store carbon, such as by re-planting trees, is lost.

The researchers discovered that land use contributed significantly to GHG emissions, accounting for around half of total emissions.

Dr. Thomas Alcock, a Future Food Beacon research fellow and postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich, led the study.

They can find the most sustainable systems for each crop type and campaign for them to be adopted more broadly because there are so many diverse production systems covered in this study, he says.

The findings, particularly in terms of land use, suggest that they should focus production on land with low carbon storage capacity. However, other sustainability indices such as biodiversity must also be considered.

Emphasis

The study emphasizes the need for and potential for improving sustainability within present production systems, such as boosting yields while reducing the use of high-carbon inputs, in the case of palm oil, more widespread deployment of methane capture devices in processing stages.

Dr. Alcock explains that this implies using as little synthetic nitrogen on crops. It is the most common source of GHG emissions on farms. This is difficult since crops require a lot of nitrogen to be productive. Still, there are ways to lessen this, such as adopting nitrogen-efficient crop cultivars and integrating leguminous plants in crop rotations, which naturally contribute nitrogen to the soil.

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