Palmoil.io Newsletter - July 2022
Welcome to our third monthly newsletter. This month we update you on our latest features, highlight high risk concessions and mills as well as tips on how to make the most out of your palmoil.io subscription. This newsletter is also publicly available on our blog. Feel free to share it.
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1. What’s new
We are hiring!
Would you like to work with us? We have positions open in Indonesia and Colombia. We are looking for a Community Liaison Manager to help coordinate our Palmoil.io training program, supervise development of training materials, and make sure Palmoil.io subscribers are well supported. The Community Liaison Manager will supervise two Liaison Officers who will conduct training, development materials, and help us maintain Palmoil.io’s ever expanding database. We are also looking for Front End Software Developers to help further develop of the design and features of Palmoil.io. If you think you have the skills, experience and drive to work with us, please apply at maphubs.com/careers.
New “News Monitor” Feature
News Monitor is our latest addition to help keep you fully informed of supply chain risks. News Monitor scours the web for the latest palm oil stories and curates them according to topic such as deforestation or land disputes. They are then filed to company dashboards. We prioritize stories published by reputable news sources and focus primarily on topics related to NDPE risks. So far, we have posted over 500 stories and add new stories each week. News Monitor will complement our grievance database, providing third party insights into potential supplier risks and sustainability progress.
New Risk Insights
Risk Insights continue to highlight multiple instances of concession level deforestation. In July, We observed continuing clearances inside concession in Kalimantan, Papua, and Sumatra. For example, renewed deforestation was detected inside Subur Karunia Raya, a concession linked to the Salim-owned IndoAgri. Other repeat cases were found in Kalimantan, including areas of orangutan habitat. Peat clearance remains a larger issue in Sumatra with a couple of concession level and smallholder cases identified in Riau.
What’s coming up
Malaysia concessions (finally!)
We have been a little delayed with our Malaysia concession dataset, but we will be launching Malaysia level concession monitoring next month. We will monitor recent and historical concessions for Sarawak, Sabah, and Peninsula Malaysia and estimate traceability to plantation.
Tip of the month
One of the values of Palmoil.io’s grievance database is the ability to track how different companies respond to grievance cases. One helpful way that you can check on past grievance cases is to sort concessions by the the number of grievances. This will list concessions with the most grievances.
You can toggle over each grievance to see the tracker and the current status. Click on the grievance to visit the profile page. This is a quick way of finding concessions with many outstanding grievances and seeing how different traders have responded to the same case.
Case of the month
Palmoil.io’s data team have been reviewing historical cases to determine whether companies are at risk of sourcing from suspended concessions and mills. One example is Arjuna Utama Sawit. This case was first submitted as a grievance in April 2019 due to industrial clearance of peat forest in Central Kalimantan. By 2020, most grievances resulted in suspensions or the removal of the company from supply chains. However, despite this removal, we link Arjuna Utama Sawit to over 25 companies through Arjuna Utama Sawit mill, which is located close to the concession. While mill lists can be out of date, the mill does appear in recently updated refinery lists, which means many downstream companies could be exposed to this risk.
Benefit of the month
An additional service that we offer is access to Forest Report - our monthly concession and mill deforestation monitoring service. Forest Report helps analyst delve deeper into deforestation cases, providing metrics for land classification, high carbon stock, and orangutan habitat. All metrics can be downloaded as a CSV for desktop analysis.
We also include recent deforestation alerts including both RADD and GLAD alerts as well as annual deforestation statistics back to 2000. If you are interested in adding Forest Report to your subscription, please contact us at info@maphubs.com.