School Notes: School of the Environment
July/August 2012

Oil palm surging source of greenhouse gas emissions

Continued expansion of industrial-scale oil palm plantations on the island of Borneo will become a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 unless strong forest and peatland protections are enacted and enforced, according to a National Academy of Sciences study. The study, conducted by Yale and Stanford researchers, found that about two-thirds of lands outside of protected areas in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan Province in Indonesian Borneo are leased to oil palm agribusiness companies. Indonesia, currently the global leader in palm-oil production, aims to increase the area for oil palm cultivation to 45 million acres by 2020 from 24 million acres in 2009, yet little is known about the influence of oil palm expansion on people and ecosystems. Palm oil is a form of edible vegetable oil used in many products, including cookies, crackers, popcorn, frozen dinners, candy, soap, and cosmetics.

Americans connect extreme weather to climate change

More than two-thirds of the American people believe global warming made several recent extreme weather disasters worse, according to a report released in May by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. The report, “Extreme Weather, Climate, & Preparedness in the American Mind,” is part of an ongoing effort to understand how Americans conceptualize and respond to climate change. A large majority of respondents attributed to global warming such events as the unusually warm winter of December 2011 and January 2012 (72 percent), record-high summer temperatures in the United States in 2011 (70 percent), the 2011 droughts in Texas and Oklahoma (69 percent), record snowfall in 2010 and 2011 (61 percent), the Mississippi River floods in the spring of 2011 (63 percent), and Hurricane Irene (59 percent). The report can be read at environment.yale.edu/climate.