This year the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) designed, field tested, and implemented standardized High Conservation Values (HCV) threat and biodiversity monitoring protocols for oil palm landscapes. These protocols were recently launched at RSPO RT10, attracting attention and interest from palm oil stakeholders across three continents.

 

HCVs are a set of social and ecological values that are considered a priority for conservation. They include the presence of endemic or endangered species, rare or endangered ecosystems, and resources and ecosystem services upon which local communities depend for their livelihoods— all of which are significantly threatened by large-scale forest conversion in palm oil landscapes.

 

There is little evidence at present that producers certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have the capacity to implement measures that are sufficient to maintain and enhance species and habitats of High Conservation Value (HCV) within their palm oil concessions, as required by the RSPO principles and criteria. Enabling and demonstrating progress towards this goal is essential to strengthen the credibility of the RSPO and promote market transformation, which will in turn maximize the potential of this voluntary mechanism to mitigate the impact of palm oil production on biodiversity. ZSL has addressed this capacity issue by developing a practical and informative monitoring system for HCVs 1-4 that will assist producers to bridge the gap between the initial HCV assessment and management plan required to obtain RSPO certification and the implementation of effective, dynamic management interventions. Use of the monitoring system also allows for the impact of management efforts on the conservation of HCVs to be measured.

 

This year ZSL’s Biodiversity and Palm Oil field teams worked with two major palm oil producers to design, field test, and implement monitoring protocols, including Threat Assessment and Biodiversity Monitoring Using Camera Traps, in two plantation sites in Kalimantan and Sumatra that together contain 5,500 hectares of HCV area. The protocol methods are low cost and relatively simple to implement, enabling plantation sustainability and patrol teams to collect high quality data with their limited budget and technical capacity. Following this initial implementation of protocols, ZSL launched the HCV monitoring protocol and accompanying software program, which facilitates storage, analysis, and reporting of the data, at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil’s annual conference (RT10), which was attended by over 750 industry stakeholders. The protocol attracted much attention, with growers in particular recognizing it as a low-cost, user-friendly mechanism that aids adherence to RSPO principles and criteria and enables plantation managers to fulfill their obligations under certification.

 

ZSL has since been approached by a large number of companies interested in implementing the protocol and adaptive management practices in their concessions. What’s more, the system can be adapted by ZSL to almost any production landscape context and is designed to fit current company structures and reporting. As uptake of this protocol expands in Indonesia, Malaysia, and West Africa, ZSL looks to also broaden the scope of monitoring to include the more complicated HCVs 5 and 6, develop training courses for HCV assessors and auditors and “training of trainers’ for companies to utilize across concessions, and develop standardized reporting frameworks with retailers and suppliers, among other activities. This work is complemented by ZSL’s online Sustainable Palm Oil Platform, containing a host of resources for producers.