Palmoil.io Newsletter - May 2023

What's New?

We are holding our first webinar!

Mark your calendars! We are hosting our first ever webinar - “Politics, Plots and Smallholders: Palm Oil Industry and the EU”. The date Wednesday, June 21st 2023 (09:00 EDT / 20:00 WIB / 14:00 CET). Click here to register. We are delighted to have Perrine Fournier from Fern, Tobias Zobel from BASF, and Mas Darto from SPKS join CEO, Leo Bottrill, in sharing their perspectives on how we can prepare for the upcoming regulation at both ends of the supply chain. We hope our conversation will give you some new insights into how the regulation can be effectively implemented and perhaps we tackle some of your gnawing questions like 'what is a plot?' and 'how can we rapidly scale up smallholder mapping'? It will be a lively discussion, so be sure to tune in and get your questions ready!

Hello Latin America! Palmoil.io launches plot maps for 9 new Latin American countries

We are super pleased to announce that we have expanded our plot data to include Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. The new data features almost 600 "plots" that Palmoil.io can trace using our estimated traceability to plantation (eTTP) to mill model. This will allow producers to track deforestation inside their plots as well as in proximity to mills. It will also assist traders and buyers monitoring their suppliers and preparing for the traceability requirements in the EUDR. And this is just the start. We have more countries in the pipeline as we aim to be first monitoring platform with global traceability to the plot.

Concession = Plot

Palmoil.io is making some changes to our vocabulary. “Concession” will be renamed as “Plot”. Why? Two reasons really. First, as the EU Deforestation Regulation is underway, we are adjusting our language to fit the EUDR language. Second, the word "plot" also better fits the increasingly wide type of data that we collect on areas allocated to palm planting around the world. We hope this change will help streamline your due diligence preparation on Palmoil.io.

Tropical Deforestation Regulations coming to New York State

There was also some groundbreaking news coming out of New York this past week. The Tropical Deforestation-Free Procurement Act is progressing through the various committees of the State Assembly and is well on its way to becoming law. The Act will ensure that New York’s taxpayer dollars are not driving the tropical deforestation that contributes to the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, and the plundering of Indigenous lands across the globe.

Achieving the NYDF goals could reduce the global emissions of greenhouse gases by 4.5–8.8 billion metric tons every year – equivalent to the United States’ annual emissions. Our CEO & Founder, Leo Bottrill participated in a webinar organized by the National Wildlife Federation and Friends of the Earth. The discussion was on the many advantages of the Bill that will have, ensuring New York leads by example in the fight to protect the world's rainforests. Leo explained how monitoring and tracing deforestation is increasingly both practical and affordable.

Palmoil.io at the RSPO Inter-American Conference

Did you happen to catch Leo this week in the first Inter-American RSPO Conference in Miami? He participated in a panel discussing "Verifying What Matters". Leo said it was a lively discussion on where we need to place our focus on ensuring palm oil can be produced deforestation free and how we are going to prepare for the EUDR and other upcoming regulations.

Moderated by Proforest's Bilge Daldeniz, the panel covered the tech and data that underpins sustainable palm oil verification. Tools will play a key role in implementing new regulations like the EUDR. Leo and his fellow panelists discussed the different data and tools that they use to monitor and verify deforestation. Panelists agreed that there are no one size fits all solutions but didn't always see eye to eye on the values of open data and who ultimately pays. Leo explained that Palmoil.io always prioritizes open data and affordability as central to making monitoring more widely available and equitable.

What’s coming up?

Our Co-Founder and Lead Engineer, Kris Carle, and our Senior Data Analyst, Cholida Sofi, will be attending the Land and Carbon Lab's Summit. Kris and Sofi are really looking forward to learning about the latest geospatial tech and data for mapping, monitoring, and analyzing land use change. They plan to share our experiences using a Global Forest Watch data to monitor palm oil.

Tip of the month

Are you down with eTTP? Apologies to 90s hip-hop fans for that one but did you know that all of our Risk Insights now come with eTTP links? eTTP is our methodology for identifying likely links from plots to mills. It stands for "Estimated Traceability to Plantation" and it establishes the likelihood of a supply chain connection that is not based on company disclosures. This is why it is considered "estimated". You can now find these eTTP links by going to the ‘Companies’ dashboard and look under ‘Risk Insights’ where you can see eTTP Supply Chain Mills filtered into tiers.

eTTP has four tiers, from highest risk of a connection to lowest: Tier 1 is the mill which is located within the plot boundary, Tier 2 is the plot which is located within 25km of the mill and owned/operated by the same company or group, Tier 3 is the plot which is located within 10km of the mill but with no known group or company ownership structure and Tier 4 is the plot which is located within 25km of the mill but with no known group or company ownership structure. This new eTTP links feature on Palmoil.io will help our enterprise users prioritize cases. You can find more details in the help doc here.

Case of the month

PT Surya Panen Subur

This case illustrates the importance of catching a deforestation case early. In this case, we have a relatively small clearing of peat forest, possibly by encroachers, inside a concession. We made a Risk Insight linking 14 companies to Surya Panen Subur mill, owned by Amara Group. Amara supplies most major palm oil refiners and traders.

This month the deforestation is continuing. While this is a new clearance, the concession has prior deforestation cases, but downstream companies have been unable to get the group owner to manage their concession nor have they suspended the mill. This plot has been flagged as high EU Deforestation Regulation Risk.

Benefit of the month

We expect that you've found our Palmoil.io Help Center by now and have been making good use of it. Our hope is that it can help our subscribers to navigate Palmoil.io better. From the many categorizations we’ve organized for you, let’s break it down. Journey on over to the “Getting Started” section to get your primary questions answered – from how to sign up?, how to sort, search and filter data on Palmoil.io tables?, to a beginner’s guide to our Risk Insights.

Head to the “Forest Monitoring” section for a better understanding of using Palmoil.io to help you in your monitoring process, you can learn more about viewing historical deforestation by timestamp, seeing pixels of the deforestation alerts, downloading Risk Insights KML files and more. Go towards the “Grievance and News” section and you’ll find your answers to finding human rights grievances, downloading a CSV of grievances, setting up a custom grievance tracker and more.