Analysing Linkages of Palm Oil, Deforestation and Local Climate through Modelling

Main Article Content

Alizan Mahadi

Abstract

The impact of oil palm plantations to the environment and livelihoods at local, regional and global levels has been a contested area. As the world aims to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), understanding the impact of anthropogenic land use and land cover change (LULCC) due to conversions of forests into oil palm plantation is critical. This paper utilised a modelling study as a numerical experiment to assess the linkages across palm oil, deforestation and local climate. By downscaling a global climate model to the context of Sabah, Malaysia, three scenarios of different levels of conversion of forests to palm oil were analysed. The results demonstrated that within the numerical experiment, the changes in temperature can be attributed to land use change, where the temperature within each land use strongly correlates with the type of land use cover. The findings have implications for land use management where land use change could lead to perturbations in the local climate.

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Research Article

References

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