The cultivation of oil palm has become emblematic of the trade-off between development and conservation that agricultural commodities have to face: matching an increasing global demand while preserving the capacity of land to provide ecosystems services. In particular, oil palm production in South-East Asia has been and is still developed at the expense of natural forests. Even produced locally palm oil is tightly connected to more global socio-economic and environmental issues.

Rationale: We, as part of the scientific community, need to better assess, through the improvement of both knowledge and tools, the 3D impacts (social-economic-environmental) of oil palm cropping systems in order to better inform the decision making process towards sustainable palm oil production.

Background: Despite the orientations given by the principles and criteria of the RSPO certification scheme (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil), there is a lack of both knowledge and appropriate toolkit to assess major 3D impacts, especially while considering the local specificity of cropping systems and their capacity to adapt to more global changes. The project aims at filling part of this gap focusing on oil palm plantations, through the choice of selected indicators for the three dimensions of sustainability, both at the holding and the landscape scales.

Questions to research: How to better assess the 3D impacts of oil palm, and make sure that new knowledge and toolkit will effectively be useful and finally adopted and used by stakeholders.

The objectives of the project are: i) to investigate the influence of global changes on the various oil palm cropping systems, ii) to identify the obstacles, opportunities, and uncertainties for the adaptation of these systems to global constraints, and iii) to elaborate strategies and tools designed to facilitate the transition towards sustainable oil palm cropping systems.

Research strategy: In order to reach these objectives the SPOP Project will follow three main lines: 1) providing new scientific-based knowledge and tools in order to assess the 3D impacts of the oil palm cropping systems, allowing to qualify the sustainability of existing systems or to identify new areas for research on sustainable systems; 2) involving stakeholders in the process by using participative methods all along the project such as , reflexives, or participatory prospective analysis; 3) identifying the obstacles and analyze whether they are related to some inherent incapacity of cropping systems to adapt or/and to some insufficient effort or success in making knowledge and tools accessible to the stakeholders.

Expected outputs will include new knowledge and data on the 3D impacts of global constraints on oil palm plantations, innovative tools to assess these impacts and support decision making processes and recommendations for the transition of cropping systems towards sustainability.