Palm Oil Competitors Join Forces to Protect Forests with High-Tech Monitoring

Ten major companies that sell and use palm oil are working together on a new radar system to accelerate the fight against deforestation, closely monitoring forests across the world’s top two palm oil producers and exporters: Malaysia and Indonesia.

The online radar system will highlight areas suffering tree loss, alerting the companies to where action is needed. The information will be accessible to governments and conservation groups, and the system’s data will be made publicly available on the Global Forest Watch website.

The producers and buyers of palm oil – the world’s most widely used oil – will be contributing nearly $1.3 million to the project, led by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and due to be up and running within two years. The companies in the project are Bunge, Cargill, Golden Agri-Resources, Mondelez, Musim Mas Group, Nestle, PepsiCo, Sime Darby Plantation, Unilever and Wilmar.

“The new technology on one side and the fact that we have all of these big actors in the room coming together to think about how we can best use the information … is really what needs to happen,” says Anne Rosenbarger, Southeast Asia commodities manager at WRI in Indonesia.