By 2050, agricultural land could shrink by up to 600 million hectares compared to the business-as-usual pathway, as forest loss is slowed or reversed. In addition, carbon pricing could pile on US$19 billion in extra costs for global palm oil, beef and soy producers. In its report, Orbitas zeroed in on Indonesian palm oil, Peru’s small but growing palm oil industry and Colombia’s relatively unproductive cattle-ranching industry. It found that Indonesia’s palm oil industry could realise US$9 billion in extra value by 2050, under a scenario where aggressive action is taken to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Using palm oil effluent to generate electricity from biogas is an “easy financial and environmental win for companies with access to capital”, stated the analysis, done by a team from the Austria-based International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis and other organisations. “If less than a tenth of Indonesia’s palm oil mills had biogas facilities, together they could support the electricity needs of 240,000 households and reduce direct emissions by 2.5 million metric tonnes of CO2-equivalent annually, with potential additional emissions reductions from displacing coal-generated electricity,” the report said, citing a study done in 2019. The analysts studied 20 palm oil firms and found that most can gain value amid climate transitions.

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