How Does Palm Oil Affect The Environment

As I talked about in section 1 the current palm oil situation is the large demand of palm oil means that the places in Southeast Asia and other countries that grow palm oil will lose their rainforests. If the production of palm oil doesn't change the environment will be greatly impacted. The probable future for the environment in Indonesia and Malaysia - the top palm oil producing countries - is that it will be destroyed. With the amount of deforestation that is happening there will be no more rainforests because they would have been burned down or logged. When trees are burned and logged it creates a large amount of CO2 and methane gas that is released into the air, which in turn creates a large amount of smog that is released into the neighbouring cities and towns. This

Without all the tall rainforest trees to protect the creeks and rivers, the water will get be heated up and possibly dry up the river beds, this will be a contributing factor to global warming. There has also been many wastewater lagoons created around the plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, these lagoons are estimated to produce about 22,000 cars’ worth of greenhouse gases every single year. The environmental impacts of palm oil are happening a lot faster then what was originally believed. Because of the mass deforestation animals like the Sumatran and Bornean Orangutans, and the Sumatran tiger, are thought to be extinct in the next seven years. This negatively impacts the Southeast Rainforest because the biodiversity and ecosystems will be thrown out of balanced with the loss of these already endangered species. An impact that is both an environmental and economic, is that there are ways to get around the laws that state how large palm oil plantations can be, the farmers clear an area of land while leaving a solid ring of rainforest around the outside of it. This is how they get away with having larger