Solar Power has been around for years. But thanks to nanotechnology, scientists have developed ways to make it a more affordable energy source for everyone. Indi Wood reports.

Nanotechnology is used to develop renewable energy. Image: Brookhaven National Laboratory

The price of solar power and other renewable energies is set to dramatically reduce thanks to nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology – the ability to control matter on a tiny atomic scale – has allowed scientists to understand how nature works on the minute level and use that knowledge to manufacture cleaner and more efficient materials.

“We’ve already using a lot of nanomaterials to make better plastics and composite materials that can start to replace materials like steel and aluminium,” says Tim Harper, a UK based scientist who is in Australia for the Clean Technology Conference in Melbourne.

“The reason we want to do that is because things like the gas mileage of your car is very much related to the weight so you lose 10 per cent of the weight and the car becomes 10 per cent more efficient.”

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Harper says experts are well on their way to making solar technology a more economically viable energy source by using plastic electronics rather than using high-cost plants.

“The reason you want to do that is then the production process looks a lot more like printing a newspaper than making a microprocessor,” he says.

“Then you’re churning these things out by the kilometre and suddenly it becomes a lot cheaper and it’s a lot more viable to use.”

Harper says more cost effective options are required if solar energy is to be seen as a viable long-term energy source.

He points out that while traditional solar panels put on roofs take 20-30 years before there is any economic payback, those developed with nanotechnology could see returns in 2-3 years.

Harper says that while many people do have environmental and safety concerns regarding nanotechnology, scientists are now much more able to predict the potential risks.

“You see something like a carbon nanotube, the first thing people thought was ‘hey that looks like an asbestos fibre, I wonder if that could have the same effect we should be careful with that,” he says.

“So I think we’re very much aware of the environmental and the health and safety things. And a lot more aware than we were say 50 years ago.”

Harper says other areas of renewable energy are also being looked at to improve efficiency.

“Batteries have improved by a factor of four since led acid batteries but they’re still pretty terrible when compared with things like gasoline for example,” he says.

“So one of the big challenges is being able to design materials that will give us that kind of efficiency, we call that materials by design.

“ We’re not quite there yet but we’re close enough that we can almost taste it.”

By Sophie Perri

Point Lowly Whyamma. Image: yewen yi

BHP Biliton’s proposed desalination plant for its Olympic Dam expansion is causing a stir as they prepare to erect the plant at Point Lowly near Whyalla.

The proposal has had 4600 submissions to its environmental impact statement and just this week, celebrity chef Simon Briant and Maggie Beer from ABC’s The Cook & The Chef cooked in Rundle Mall in protest to the plan.

They say it’s going to destroy the giant cuttlefish and the gulf prawn in Spencer Gulf and have damaging consequences on the seafood industry.

Local Greens MP Mike Parnell described the level of opposition surrounding the proposed plant.

“Point Lowly is not the right spot for a desalination plant because we cannot guarantee the protection of our wildlife… whether its wildlife like the giant Australian Cuttle Fish, or wildlife like commercial species of prawns and fish,” he said.

Mr Parnell was also in favour of high-profile Australian’s who have been speaking out against the plant’s development. “Having some celebrity chefs and other icons of the food industry such as Michael Angelakis who is one of the doyens of the Seafood industry in South Australia, having them weigh into it adds an extra level,” he said.

David Noonan, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, says across Australia desalination plants are going to cause problems.

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“Australia has essentially rolled over for major desalination corporate interests, and instead of conserving water and reusing storm water in our cities, which we could readily do, we are simply turning on the tap further and plugging in major energy-intensive gadgetry that will put us at cost either for significant increased fossil-fuel use and greenhouse emissions, or that it may simply use up and expend a lot of our additional and new renewable energy sources,” he said.

Mr Noonan was also concerned by the energy-intensive nature of the desalination plants stating that “The major desalination plant proposed for Sydney is said to be powered by offset wind power but the wind farms that they’re citing for that could instead have been used to power the homes of some quarter of the people who live in Canberra and the ACT.”

Despite the water shortage in Australia, Mr Noonan believes the proposed desalination plants to be a dangerous misuse of funds, “Desalination should be a solution of last resort. We should be using all our available means in water conservation in storm water capture and reuse rather than paying a very much higher price for water and locking us into high technology solutions that are potentially, seriously highly unnecessary for our urban communities.”

Sophie Perri is a Producer on 2SER’s The Wire

By Jenny Jägerhorn | Melbourne Editor

Described as the 'dirtiest power station in Australia,' protesters are fighting for its closure. Image: Courtesy of Greenpeace/Hunt

With state and federal elections looming, the campaign by environmental activists to close Hazelwood, Australia’s dirtiest power station, is set to intensify with a demonstration planned for Thursday.

Environment Victoria, the state’s peak non-government environment organization, has been lobbying for closure since a demonstration last September in which 22 people were arrested amid ugly scenes.

Replace Hazelwood campaigners say Victoria must change the way it gets its energy supplies and the number one priority is to replace Hazelwood power station.

“It’s old, it’s inefficient and it’s time for it to be replaced. We have got this opportunity now because the owners have signalled that they will be willing to shut down, so there is a big opportunity for the government to step in and close Hazelwood and subsidize clean energy,” Environment Victoria climate change campaigner Victoria McKenzie-McHarg said.

Environment Victoria says the demonstration, scheduled to take place on May 6 on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne, is for those wanting “real action to slash Victoria’s greenhouse pollution.”

The organisations behind the campaign to close Hazelwood power station are pressing the state and federal governments to negotiate with owners International Power to close it by 2012.

Environment Victoria feels optimistic it can negotiate closure.

In interviews with Reportage-Enviro, the union agrees that closure is inevitable, although it believes several years will be required, and the operator says it may agree to close the plant so long as compensation is paid.

Meanwhile, the Victorian government prolonged Hazelwood power station’s contract. It was scheduled to close down in 2005, but the Labor Government extended its contract until 2030.

Hazelwood burns brown coal, which is one of the dirtiest energy forms and is, according to Environment Victoria, responsible for 15 per cent of Victoria’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. According to a report commissioned by Environment Victoria – Victoria’s Energy Mix 2000-2009, Victoria’s reliance on coal fired electricity has increased in the last decade with both electricity generation and greenhouse pollution from coal increasing by nine percent since 2000.

Ms McKenzie-McHarg said that the Victorian government was under real pressure with an election looming and that seats could go to the Greens.

“People… will be watching very closely to see what the government decides to do on this issue,” she said.

“No plans to close within years”

Hazelwood’s owner International Power says the company itself decides when to close and has no plans to do it for years.

“It won’t be any union’s, it won’t be any environmental group’s, neither the state or federal Government’s decision. We will decide when it closes,” said Mr Neil Lawson, Public Affairs Manager at International Power Hazelwood.

He said that if governments were “wanting to phase out all the coal-fired power stations then there is a process to go through it, it is not a statement of closing down Hazelwood within a certain period of time.”

“We are not prepared to do anything until we see some certainty in the carbon policy direction of the Federal government,“ said Mr Lawson.

The Australian Government has claimed it is strongly committed to reducing carbon pollution with a goal of reducing emissions by 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020.

But last week Prime Minster Kevin Rudd delayed plans until the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

International power shares a vision with the both state and federal governments that coal will form the majority of the energy-mix in Australia for “some time to come.” The power station claims there is no replacement for efficient based coal power in this country at this point of time.

Minimum seven years transition

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union recognises that moving away from coal is inevitable but believes that the transition time needs to be at least seven years. The average age of its members is 53 years, so it believes a natural or early retirement could be a solution.

“Our members want security in the employment for the duration of their working life. The government will obviously have to play a significant role, because they will need to mandate that companies that are closing down will shift their younger employees across to power companies that are going to hang around for a while, because you can only close them down at a certain phase,” said Greg Hardy, Victorian secretary of the CFMEU’s mining and energy division.

After the privatisation of Hazelwood Power station in 1996, there were a lot of job losses in La Trobe Valley and, according to Mr Hardy, the workers got little help from the government. There is still a lot of mistrust in the Government.

“Both sides of politics in Victoria have been the enemy in La Trobe Valley for quite some time and I can’t see that suddenly changing. The Government does not talk to our union. They treat us like second-class citizens, but they seem to have lunches with the power industry bosses on a regular basis. Whether or not that will change, who knows,” said Mr Hardy.

In terms of the elections, Mr Hardy does not see much choice for the public because the major parties implement similar politics; they are both pro-coal.

“It’s the companies they look after and obviously for companies who aren’t presently set up in our industry that makes it very difficult for them, because it’s the big existing companies that get listened to, when their setting policy, not the future companies,” said Mr Hardy.

“In terms of the future of coal I think the future lays in alternate usage for it. But that is along way off,” said Mr Hardy.

Options to coal

Environment Victoria’s wants to reduce electricity demand in Victoria through energy efficiency measures.

It also supports new gas-fired power stations in Western Victoria as part of a transition, while building up renewable energy sources.

“La Trobe Valley is a manufacturing heart and we could be renewable energy and green technology there, but we need the Governments support for that,” said Ms McKenzie-McHarg.

Mr Hardy from CFMEU agrees that demand management is needed and believes it is possible through government regulation.

“You need base load renewable energy and the only one that seems to have the runs on the board at this stage is the solar thermal, with large scale storage. We would probably also need to have some sort of interim period where a bit more gas was used, but either way it would take a while to replace our older stations so that you progressively shut down an older station and whilst you’re doing that you’re commissioning new cleaner plants,” said Mr Hardy.

Professors Rachel Webster and Edwin Van Leeuwen of Melbourne University are working on a project called the Victorian Geothermal Assessment Report, on Geothermal power. They have discovered that the best site on earth for this is the Latrobe Valley, a prospective geothermal site with a vast amount of brown-coal needed for the process. An operational test plant could be running within four years for $100 million.

The next report will be published later this year.

Jenny Jägerhorn is a GEJI exchange student currently at Monash University in Melbourne.

Lauren Said-Moorhouse | Chief Editor

Algae has the potential to be converted into biodiesel and in use by society within ten years. Image: CSIRO

Australia’s top researchers are leading the charge to find an alternative to the oil crisis with a solution that would make Mother Earth herself proud.

Experts in the field of biological sciences and engineering are currently conducting intense examinations of various strains of algae to create a form of biodiesel. One such specialist is Dr Jian Qin who is also a senior lecturer in Aquaculture at Flinders University in South Australia.

“We are working on the conditions for mass culture of the oil producing algae. We have been doing this for more than five years,” he says.

“It’s very exciting for two reasons. The first is because of the long term oil shortage. Secondly, algae provides what we call it; the second generation which is more advantageous. Also, algae grows very fast.”

Leading expert Professor Michael Borowitzska, a Marine phycologist at Western Australia’s Murdoch University, has been researching algae as a biofuel for over 25 years. Professor Borowitzska is also part of the team that constructed the Dunaliella salina plant at Hutt Lagoon in Western Australia, the largest microalgae production plant in the world.

Speaking previously to Science Network Western Australia, he says, “I started looking at algae during the last big oil crisis in 1980 when oil was $80 a barrel, but then the oil price dropped and people lost interest. Now lots of people are rediscovering the wheel, suddenly the oil price is making algae biodiesel feasible.

“Their [algae’s] suitability depends on how much oil they produce, the sort of environment they grow in and their suitability for large-scale culture. What we have done is isolate some species that are particularly good for biofuel in saline conditions. You need a lot of salty water to grow the algae, lots of sunshine and as little rain as possible. In WA we have all three.”

Australia’s national science agency, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is also working hard on enhancing algae biofuel technology and understanding. In reaction to Australia’s major research challenges and opportunities, nine departments were established at CSIRO including the Energy Transformed Flagship.

“The Flagship was set up to look at all forms of fuel and energy in order to make sure that in the future in Australia, we didn’t have any problems when oil, gas and coal started to get more expensive or harder to get. And also taking into account the increasing greenhouse gas emissions being put into the air,” says Flagship researcher, Peter Campbell.

Dr Campbell is part of the team, headed up by CSIRO Energy Transformed researcher Dr Tom Beer, that discovered new potential for algal biofuel whilst conducting research into the life-cycle analysis of the benefits of algal biodiesel.

In a statement released by the CSIRO, Dr Beer said, “Our research has shown that under ideal conditions it is possible to produce algal biodiesel at a lower cost and with less greenhouse gas emissions than fossil diesel.

“The greenhouse gas reductions are the result of avoiding the use of a fossil resource for fuel production, capturing methane produced by the processed algae to generate energy and taking into account the potential greenhouse gas offsets from industry.”

“Making biodiesel from algae removes the issue of competing land use because the facilities would not be established on land that might otherwise be used to grow food and the algal farm has a very low environmental impact in comparison to crops that are grown for biodiesel,” said Dr Beer.

Explaining a simplified version of the process change from algae into biodiesel, Dr Campbell says, “You can have a number of different ways of growing the algae in the first place. The easiest is basically to make a hole in the ground next to the ocean and grow a species that likes lots of salt water and then use salt water from the ocean to grow it in. Then what you do, is provide a small amount of fertilisers and if you want to grow it, really a source of carbon dioxide. Once you’ve got the concentration high enough, you can use other devices to concentrate the algae a bit further to the point where you can use conventional machinery to kind of squash it and get all the oil out.

“Once you have the oil you can use conventional means for turning it into biodiesel, just like with canola oil by adding a catalyst of potassium hydroxide and a few other things. You end up with a fuel that is very similar to diesel.”

But is algal biofuel a viable solution to sustainable transport options? Dr Campbell believes it could be.

“Potentially yes. At the moment, nobody has been able to produce commercial levels of algae at a price cheap enough to compete with normal diesel and also it will take several years to scale it up to a point where it would be able to provide a decent amount of Australia’s current fuel usage.”

Algal biofuels could potentially be used in normal diesel engines with little or no modification. The problem is harvesting enough to make it commercially viable.

Dr Campbell says, “The average family car in Australia drives about 15,000 km per year and requires 11 L/100km, but that’s on ULP [unleaded petrol], and is for a car a few years old. Modern diesel cars are a bit more efficient so they only require about 7 L/100km. So if you have a modern diesel family car you need about 1050 litres of fuel per year.”

“A hectare of algal ponds could provide enough fuel for 20-21 vehicles. However, this is just for the ponds; you need about 25% more land for processing equipment, roads, buildings, etc. So a hectare of land would give you enough fuel for 16-17 Australian modern diesel vehicles, only about 10 older vehicles, though.”

With 10,000 square metres in a hectare, a regular new diesel car would need an estimated 600 square metres of area in order to provide fuel for it. This is approximately the size of a large house block.

So perhaps the technology isn’t quite ready for us to start creating algal biofuel in our backyards.

The CSIRO Energy Transformed flagship is currently working on ways of moving forwards for the technology considering costs and benefits of generating algal biodiesel.

“We are part of the algal fuel consortium along with industry and universities. And we are basically working together to create some medium scale algae farms and trial out a number of different technologies and see where we can go from there,” says Dr Campbell.

“In the flagship, what we eventually see if for most of the vehicles in Australia to eventually be run on electricity. However, there will be a changeover period in between. What we need to find is a fuel that basically doesn’t compete with food…That’s where we see biodiesel as being a possibility.”

With the trial only currently in the set-up process, it could be several years before we see any developments. But that doesn’t mean to say that academics in the field aren’t excited.

Tony Vassallo, a professor from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and part of The Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering, says, “It’s a great future potential and we should be involved.

“The interesting thing about it is it doesn’t really require cropping, like land cultivation so it can be carried out above ground. It doesn’t have to take up huge amounts of water and other nutrients so it has an attraction for us in Australia as you can use quite degraded land to generate it.”

In a similar vein, Executive director of Plant Functional Biology and Climate Change Cluster at the University of Technology Sydney, Associate Professor Peter Ralph says, “There is a whole range or research going into selecting and identifying the best alga that makes the most with it and the greatest amount of oil in the production. That’s where the cutting edge is.”

“It’s getting the photosystems optimised and getting the algae to produce an alcohol-derived, ethanol-derived oil. If we can get that happening, it will work.”

Associate Professor Ralph also agrees that algal biodiesel could be a worthwhile stepping stone into the electrification of vehicles.

“We could have algal biofuel as an interim, not as a long-term permanent solution which could happen in the next ten years. But not quicker than that.
“By that stage, a lot of other technologies, like electricity generation will be more mature and transport could be electrified.”

But Australia isn’t the only country working on algal biofuel technology. In the United States a monopoly of companies and universities are working hard to make the research viable.

In September, a modified Toyota Prius nicknamed The Algaeus conducted a 10-day roadtrip of over 6000 kilometres from San Francisco to New York using an algae biofuel provided by Sapphire Energy.

Jason Pyle, Sapphire Energy’s chief executive said, “America has the opportunity to usher in a new, prosperous green age by moving from ‘black’ to ‘green’ crude while bettering the environment and solidifying energy security.”

The trip coincided with the premiere of the ecological film FUEL, which features The Algaeus.

But that isn’t to say that Australia is behind in its research.

Associate Professor Ralph says, “Every country around the globe is still looking for the right alga, the right way to manipulate it, the right way to scale up and to have the efficiency of scale to work.

“I think Australia is putting a huge amount of money into it and it’s being centralised in a few areas. They’ve got an awful lot of activity in Adelaide. Government investments, CSIRO investments and also South Australia and Western Australia have always had a long history in algal culture. So its not surprising that that’s the Australian hub of that research.”

So the future might be green and slimy and come in the form of algal biodiesel but as Associate Professor Ralph says, “The optimal alga just doesn’t exist yet.”

Environmentalists argue that what began as an initiative to clean up dirty palm oil production practices, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has become little more than an NGO-endorsed greenwashing tool. Rebecca Zhou reports.

Due to an increase in worldwide demand for food, palm oil production has grown dramatically since it began in the 1970s. Image: CELCOR

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was set up by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to involve companies in creating more sustainable ways of producing palm oil. However environmental experts believe that not only is the RSPO ineffective, it has become a way to green wash poor practices.

“The RSPO gives the companies a green front and encourages more consumption, which is precisely the cause of the problem,” said Valerie Phillips, forest campaigner of the Greenpeace branch in Papua New Guinea, one of the three countries most adversely affected by the palm oil industry.

The Roundtable board includes stakeholders from producers, processors to traders and retailers who work with NGOs to develop a set of ‘Principles and Criteria’ that all member companies must follow to be certified.

One of the environmentalists’ main concerns is that there is no legal framework around the ‘P&C’ and companies work at their own pace to meet them. Often they are not met at all.

“It is a voluntary initiative so the company cannot even be held accountable for failing to meet standards,” said Eddie Tanago of the Centre of Environmental Law and Community Rights (CELCOR) in Papua New Guinea.

“Up till now there are 11 or 12 companies certified under RSPO mechanism, however all of the companies have gotten complaints because of most of them are not following the principles and criteria of RSPO but still have the certificate,” said Agrofuels campaigner from Friends of the Earth Indonesia, Torry Kuswardono.

WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Manager Lydia Gaskell says that companies wanting to be certified are given action plans and targets according to ‘the size of the company and how sustainable they are.’

“To take a company off certification for failing to meet standards and criteria is at the very least, impractical,” said Gaskell. “There would be no need for the RSPO if everyone was meeting those principles and standards from day one.”

The fact that action plans and targets are negotiable is another weakness, said Grant Rosoman, Forests Campaigner for Greenpeace International. He believes that WWF’s close affiliation with businesses has led to compromises in their conservation efforts.

Misuse of environmental indicators

Under the P&C, the company must work with WWF to identify ‘High Value Conservation Forest’ (HCVF) areas prior to plantation. WWF, with the assistance of other independent consultancies such as Daemeter Consulting use a HCVF ‘toolkit’ as a framework to define these areas.

“They’ve taken the HCVF concept and misused it,” said Rosoman, “The HCVF is essentially open to interpretation and when used this way, the assessments see heavy interference from the company.”

“Say the assessment is done and 50 percent of the land is written off as being primary forest. The company says not feasible. It then becomes negotiable with WWF to reducing that down to a more ‘economic level’. In the end it gets to something ridiculous like only 10 percent of the area.”

WWF has been under fire in the past for receiving enormous levels of funding from corporate companies. In 2007, it received $20 million from Coca Cola for research into water efficiency. Its 2008 annual Financial Report recorded revenue of $196.5 million while Greenpeace reported a 2007-08 revenue of a little over $40 million.

“WWF needs to take a side and really stick to their guns and not be influenced by the client. Poor HVCF assessments risks good work done on the ground,” said Rosoman.

Kuswardono is also concerned with the lack of transparency with HCVF assessments and the role that WWF plays in the process.

“It’s hard to know what WWF’s role is because they are always acting in the gray area between the government and the company,” said Kuswardono.

“Although WWF will set principles and criteria which promote their interests in HCV forests, they won’t push the companies to implement them.”

Violation of land rights

Investigations into RSPO certified company Wilmar International show that it has been clearing land without proper consultation with communities. Criterion 2.3 in the P&C states that the company must ensure ‘use of land for oil palm does not diminish the legal rights, or customary rights, of other users, without their free, prior and informed consent’ and that prior negotiations with locals must involve ‘open sharing of all relevant information in appropriate forms and languages, including assessments of impacts, proposed benefit sharing and legal arrangements.’

Kuswardono says that when companies do consultations, they are insufficient and often misleading.

Child pushing a wheelbarrow. Image: CELCOR

“They will use tactics of division by selecting certain figures of the community who support their projects and cause a divide between communities in this way.”

A joint investigation by NGOs into Singapore palm oil giant Wilmar International in October 2009 revealed that crucial information about land rights were often omitted during negotiations with community. The team discovered that a large majority of local people living in the Landak plantation area had been misled into relinquishing their land to the company.

Under Indonesian law, the land leased to a company is returned to the government, and not the original owner. The investigation showed that those who agreed to relinquish their land did it under the belief that they could reclaim ownership after expiration of the lease.

The investigation team reported that ‘they [community leaders] vehemently asserted that the lands were theirs and should revert to them and that they had only lent the lands to the companies for their use (hak pakai). Two interviewees in the widely separated districts went on to say that they would never have agreed to release their lands if they had known that this was permanent.’

Health issues

A study by CELCOR in 2006 reveals that some of Cargill’s plantations managed by its subsidiary Higaturu, have also gravely affected communities’ health.

In 1976, Higaturu, a subsidiary of Cargill started a plantation in Popondetta in Oro Province, where the Kokoda Track is situated. The health effects of the mill on local communities for the past 33 years has been severe and in some cases, irreversible.

The study documented the effects of nine toxic chemicals such as the herbicide ‘paraquat’ used commonly in all plantations as well as a variety of insecticides. Its effects range from skin diseases, ulceration and alterations to the Central Nervous System resulting in intense nausea and loss of reflexes. Paraquat was banned by the European Union (EU) in 2007 but remains legal in most developing countries. Though it is still commonly used in Australia and New Zealand, there are strict regulations governing it.

“The people live all the way down near the rivers there and those rivers have all been polluted with the effluent from the mills. The company reports claim that it is a hundred per cent treated but it’s not,” said Tanago.

“The people depend on the river for living. They drink from it and they wash their clothes in it and they continue to do so because they have nowhere else to go.”

In response to allegations of pollution made by CELCOR and Friends of the Earth to the RSPO grievances panel in 2008, Wilmar responded that they would prepare ‘to adopt a precautionary approach by conducting Environmental lmpact Assessments, a full HCVF Assessment and Social Impact Assessments before any land development in the area commences.’

But Tanago maintains that he has not seen any real commitment from the company.

“Their complaints have fallen on deaf ears. The company says that there is no scientific backing and sometimes they will just refuse to answer them. There is evidence of suffering though. About 60 per cent of a village of 200 people are affected. Only few ever speak up about it.”

WWF also seems to believe that complaints from the communities and findings of NGOs require more substantial evidence.

“There will always be allegations, and WWF can’t be everywhere at once.”

“Cargill and Wilmar are definitely not a hundred per cent there yet,” said Gaskell, “In fact I wouldn’t say that any of the companies are quite there yet.”

“WWF is very much aware of the situation on the ground,” said Grant Rosaman, forests campaigner for Greenpeace International, “But when WWF becomes an external assessment body for the companies, the companies become their clients and it gets very difficult for them to stay loyal to their agenda.”

Forest Restoration coordinator for WWF Indonesia, Fitrian Ardiansyah concedes that some companies on the Roundtable have continued their malpractices.

“This is a challenge for us. And we have been naming and shaming companies which use the RSPO to cover up their practices,” said Ardiansyah.

The RSPO website has a list of companies whose memberships have been terminated but no such ‘name and shame’ list that draws attention to the alleged malpractices of major companies like Wilmar and Cargill exists. An older version of the RSPO website however, did report a complaint made against Wilmar International by Friends of the Earth in January 2008.

Complaints made against companies are dealt with by the Grievances Board, which consists of stakeholders instead of external assessors. In response to the allegations against Wilmar, the executive board stated that ‘There are three items in the response where further assurance is to be secured…none of these three items, individually or collectively, were considered as invalidating the acceptability of the response.’ There was no specification of what those three items were and whether Wilmar delivered its assurance. At the time of this article’s publication, the executive board’s response had been removed from the new RSPO website, a move that further shows the board’s lack of transparency.

The Singapore biofuel giant remains a member of the Roundtable and received full certification in January 2009 as ‘a testament of Wilmar’s strong commitment towards sustainable palm oil production, based on sound management and active engagement with the different stakeholders in the palm oil supply chain’, according to a company press statement.

Villagers are contracted by major companies to harvest palm oil. Image: CELCOR

Gaskell describes the Roundtable as a ‘journey of improvement’ that WWF guides them along. It is also a journey for the organisation itself, which is constantly seeking ways to improve the principles and criteria.

“RSPO has worked hard to get a set of standards that are far and beyond the current level of practices. They are the best practice management right now. And those standards are not set. WWF will continue working with companies to strengthen them.”

But both international and local campaigners believe that WWF is missing the point, which is that without a legal framework within the country that can govern a company’s actions, the RSPO is useless. Furthermore, local governments often have no regard for the environmental impacts of plantations and this makes it difficult for the company to carry out assessments without heavy financial losses and thereby making them more likely to skip the process.

Government indifference

In Indonesia, the Department of Agriculture regulates and distributes permits to companies. These location permits provide for the transfer of rights of the land to companies for commercial uses but are only valid for three years. In that time, companies must carry out initial surveys, socialisation programs and environmental impact assessments, secure investments, apply for and be granted requisite permits for clearance and construction and install the necessary infrastructure. Delays occur for a number of reasons and permits are often forfeited if the company cannot complete the process on time.

“It is very likely that the companies will not perform assessments or community consultations properly because they are afraid they will lose the land to someone else,” said Kuswardono.

“The government in Indonesia or Papua New Guinea doesn’t care how much forest will be destroyed when they give out these permits.”

The same investigation by Sawit Watch, Wild Asia and Forest Peoples Programme found that as a reaction to complaints of other businesses, governments often rush to reallocate these permits to other companies. Wilmar International was reported to have had over a total area of 120,100 ha in 2006 with active permits. By 2009, the Minister for Agriculture had cancelled permits to almost all these areas and had then restored to Wilmar only 52,204 ha. The main receiver of the permits was a company called Djarum, which is not RSPO certified and was alleged to have cleared land without conducting environmental impact assessments or securing agreements from host communities.

“The big task which WWF and RSPO should focus on is creating a legal bind for the HVC assessments so that companies can be held accountable for their actions,” said Tanago.

“Nothing is being done right now about the pollution and land clearance because the government is on the company’s side.”

WWF concedes that it is a difficult situation but maintains that it is taking a constructive approach.

“We have been involved with the Indonesian government since the early days of the RSPO and taking all the necessary steps in the process,” said Ardiansyah, former forest restoration coordinator for WWF Indonesia. “It is a difficult process because the government does not yet understand.”

“But I would say that 50 per cent of the P&C have already been incorporated into government agenda. The critical points related to social and indigenous issues are not quite there yet.”

Carbon emissions

Palm oil production also accounts for a large majority of Indonesia’s carbon emissions. When each hectare of peatland is drained for oil palm production, an estimated 3,750-5,400 tons of carbon dioxide is released over 25 years. Due to this, Indonesia is the highest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the U.S.

The Roundtable held its annual conference in Kuala Lumpur in early November 2009 and according to its press releases, the executive board managed to ‘reach a compromise in which some emissions reduction requirements will be directly incorporated in the Roundtable’s certification standards.’ Again, the standards to be followed will be voluntary.

“This is a move in the right direction,” said Adam Harrison, WWF’s representative on the RSPO Executive Board in a press statement released after the meeting. “We encourage companies to embrace emissions reduction standards once they become available and do their part to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change.”

The fact that the RSPO does not factor the enormous levels of CO2 emitted from plantations has been one of the primary concerns of NGOs. WWF appears to consider the outcome of the latest annual meeting a constructive step forward but it is unlikely that the others will agree.