RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 More sustainable vegetable oil: balancing productivity with carbon storage opportunities
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.14.444195
DO 10.1101/2021.05.14.444195
A1 Alcock, Thomas D
A1 Salt, David E
A1 Wilson, Paul
A1 Ramsden, Stephen J
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/17/2021.05.14.444195.abstract
AB Intensive cultivation and post-harvest vegetable oil production stages are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Variation between production systems and reporting disparity have resulted in discordance in previous emissions estimates. To assess systems-wide GHG implications of meeting increasing edible oil demand, we performed a unified re-analysis of life cycle input data from diverse oil palm, soybean, rapeseed, and sunflower production systems, from a saturating search of published literature. The resulting dataset reflects almost 6,000 producers in 38 countries, and is representative of over 74% of global vegetable oil production. Determination of the carbon cost of agricultural land occupation revealed that carbon storage potential drives variation in production GHG emissions, and indicates that expansion of production in low carbon storage potential land, whilst reforesting areas of high carbon storage potential, could reduce net GHG emissions whilst boosting productivity. Nevertheless, there remains considerable scope to improve sustainability within current production systems.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.