PALMOILMAGAZINE, KUALA LUMPUR – The Malaysian Oil Scientists and Technologists’ Association (MOSTA) will hold a conference in Kuala Lumpur themed “Palm Oil Industries and the Circular Economy” on October 22, 2024. This event, led by MOSTA President Tan Sri Augustine Ong, aims to highlight the sustainability potential of palm oil.
A key focus of the conference will be the latest scientific evidence on palm oil’s carbon absorption capacity. Research suggests that palm oil is up to 10 times more effective in carbon absorption than other seed oils. Under optimal conditions, palm oil can produce between 17 to 19 tons of oil per hectare annually, although the current average is around four tons per hectare.
“If yields increase, we could see a significant leap in carbon absorption,” said Professor Dennis Murphy of the University of Wales, as quoted by Palmoilmagazine.com from NST on Tuesday, August 6, 2024. Murphy also noted that palm oil has the potential to absorb carbon as effectively as tropical forests in some cases, outperforming other oil crops.
Also Read: The Carbon Emission Potential of Palm Oil Plantations
Trees and tropical plants collectively absorb more than 1,000 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, but this process is threatened by deforestation and peatland degradation. To address the imbalance between emissions and carbon absorption, it is crucial to both reduce net emissions and enhance carbon absorption capacity.
He also explained the effective policy to escalate carbon absorption would be about to plant tropical plants in agroforestry system, limit forest deforestation, plant the peat, and audit carbon impact in the main planting system. In this context palm oil was identified as the good candidate to produce energy from labors’ employment.
President of MOSTA, Tan Sri Augustine Ong emphasized that to increase carbon absorption would be realized by developing plants varieties that produce more. “Fresh fruit bunch got escalated up to three times. This coujld escalate carbon absorption twice more when the new variety was just planted for the next decades,” he said.
The conference would discuss the strategies to maximize biomass absorption potential that might not be taken for advantages, such as, the leaves, stalks of palm oi. “Only science would make palm oil critics silent,” Ong emphasized. (P2)
