Giving Compass' Take:

• Futurity reports on how palm oil demand has surged in the past decade and deforestation is rising in major oil palm-producing countries — most notably in areas certified as “sustainable.”

• What can environmental funders do to help protect our world's forests? It starts with coordinating an effort to scrutinize labels such as "sustainable" more closely.

• Here's why restoring forests is investable thanks to new tech and political urgency.

Food, biofuels, and cosmetics all contain palm oil. It’s cheap and has enjoyed a “good-for-you” reputation. Global usage went for 37 million metric tons in 2006 to 64.2 million in 2016.

“Oil palms are grown in some of the most sensitive and ecologically important forests in the world. Protecting them is important,” says Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, research associate at the Forest Advanced Computing and Artificial Intelligence Lab of the forestry and natural resources department at Purdue University.

“But we’ve seen that even when operations are certified as sustainable, there is still significant forest loss. It seems that there is no way to sustainably produce palm oil to meet today’s global demand.”

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), formed by retailers, banks, investors, and environmental advocates in 2004, and the Palm Oil Innovation Group, a similar organization founded in 2013, developed guidelines that allow for sale of palm oil as sustainable. That label means ensuring that forest conservation value is assessed and steering clear of high-carbon stock areas.

Those efforts are not effective, Gatti says.

Based on records from governmental departments and non-governmental organizations, as well as satellite data from 2001-2016, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea have lost about 31 million hectares of forest cover. That’s about 11 percent of their total land cover.

Read the full article about how palm oil demand ravages forests by Brian Wallheimer at Futurity.