TED Talks Daily - The real cost of palm oil | Andika Putraditama

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Palm oil is in nearly every commodity you use — food, shampoo, makeup and more — but the harvesting of this essential material has contributed to the destruction of millions of hectares of forests globally. Sustainability expert Andika Putraditama has an ambitious plan to turn this crisis on its head, funding forest conservation with money from the very companies that make the greatest raw material impact. Hear his vision for preserving the forests still standing, restoring the ones we’ve lost — and making sure we don’t miss the forest for the trees.Want to help shape TED’s shows going forward? Fill out our survey!Become a TED Member today at ted.com/joinLearn more about TED Next at ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hough. You may have heard the phrase, the forests are the Earth's lungs. And yet, more than a third of the world's forests have been cleared in just the last 300 years, a landmass approximately 1.5 times the size of the United States. The commodities that have been created from this deforestation—wood, palm oil, to name a couple—

are so ubiquitous in our world today that taking them out of production is nearly impossible. But for sustainability expert Andhika Putradatama, there's no way to mitigate climate change without stopping the loss of the world's forests. In his 2024 talk, he shares his vision for preserving the forests we still have, restoring the ones we've lost, and what has to be done in order for us

to not miss the forest for the trees. be done in order for us to not miss the forest for the trees. you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. You searched for your informant who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed.

You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. Support for this episode comes from Airbnb. Every time I travel to Vancouver for the TED conference, I think of extending the trip by one more day to explore. Maybe visit Granville Island to check out their public market, to browse the colorful food and produce, or try out one of their world famous donuts or some fresh food. Maybe with my extra time I could

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the biggest source of carbon emissions are actually coming from the loss of our forests and the burning of the pitland, that is, this really carbon-rich ecosystem that is made up of dead organic matters accumulated over thousands of years. Globally, the agriculture, the forest and the land use sectors actually contribute to around a fifth of the global emission,

which is significant, right? So there's no viable pathway for us to really mitigate climate change without really stopping the loss of our forests and without actually starting protecting this massive natural carbon sink that is our peatland, our mangroves. But what's causing the loss of this critical ecosystem? Well, it's actually the production of commodities that we use every day, things like timber or palm oil that is so ubiquitous

that there's a good chance when you walk to your local supermarket stores almost all products in the shelves have something to do with palm oil, one way or another. But it also tells you that this product, this commodity is so prevalent, it's so embedded in our daily life, in our daily economy, that completely taking out the production and the consumption of it might not be realistic at all.

And so companies have recognized this dilemma, and they've introduced policies such as the no-deforestation policy. And what it does is that it dictates them to really make sure that the palm oil that they're buying is not contributing to forest loss, which is a good start. But that's only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is that, if you really want to have a nature-positive outcome out of this,

is that you have to start proactively protecting the existing forest and restoring those who we have lost. And here's the bad news. Forest conservation financing is massively underfunded. The mitigation actions under the agriculture, forest and land use is severely underfunded that it only receives around less than 4 percent of the total global climate financing.

And this is the problem that we're trying to solve with a mechanism called the RIMBA collective. So I have a political science background, as well as a foreign science background, and I've spent the majority of my career working with the government's companies in South Asia and civil society to reduce the impact of commodity supply chain. And what RIMBA collective mechanism allows us to do is it lets the company to contribute funds

to protect and restore the natural ecosystem proportionate to their raw material impact. And in this case, the more they use palm oil, the more they have to contribute to this RIMBA collective fund. And it allows us to have this scalable, The more they use palm oil, the more they have to contribute to this RIMBA collective fund. And it allows us to have this scalable, large-scale, long-term financing, but it also introduces this sense of shared responsibility and proportionate responsibility across the supply chain.

And our aim is to be able to deliver the conservations of around half a million hectares of forest in Southeast Asia over the next 25 years, while also providing local livelihood for the communities that depend on it and preserving the habitats of critically endangered species in the forest area. And RIMBA Collective is not just a concept. So we've been doing this for three years now,

and we're now actively financing around 220,000 hectares of forest in Southeast Asia. But it is not without its challenge. Finding a good, infestable forest conservation project is challenging. The first thing that you need to do is to identify forests that have already had land management rights, at least over the next 20 years, because we want to ensure that any kind of interventions,

any kind of investments that we made to protect the forest can sustain over the long term. Second challenge is that some of these forests are located in a really remote location. I happened to visit one of our projects that is considered as accessible in the western coast of Sumatra, and it took me two hour flights to get to the province from the capital of Jakarta,

and another 12 hours car ride just to arrive to the village, and then another full day's hike just to reach the border of the projects. Other projects might require us to get on a boat, a full day's boat ride, just to arrive to the village. Imagine finding good local organizations or local company who can deliver robust conservation, who knows the landscape, but also able to navigate a complex international certification system.

Not many organizations can do that. And so we have to build an ecosystem of capable organizations that can deliver these conservations. The second challenge is on the demand side. So when we're talking to companies to invest in funds like RIMBA Collective, some of them are still thinking that, you know, maybe protections and the restorations of nature is not our responsibility.

Or maybe they think that conservation is cheap. Putting five dollars per hectare on the table is enough to call it conservation. Some of them might think that I'm in it for the next three years, and then I'm out. All of those are wildly, wildly unrealistic. Some of these projects, they have to buy motorbikes. They have to buy cars to patrol the area.

Some even have to build watchtowers in the middle of nowhere, multiple watchtowers. And some of our projects, they need to build dams to start regulating the water table when they're restoring the pitland ecosystem. And of course, all of that requires a significant amount of investment. And so, what's the ideal way forward for us? Well, first thing is that we need to change the perception

that the protections and the restorations of our natural ecosystem should just be a charity project. It shouldn't be. The products that you use every day, maybe the shampoo that you use this morning, might not reflect the true environmental cost behind them. The forest that was lost to grow the ingredients that goes in it, or the carbon that was lost,

and will not be absorbed in the future, because the trees are no longer there. And so by linking these metrics of procurement of raw commodities directly to the conservation financing, we should be able to recapture that externality cost and redirect that to the conservation or natural ecosystem. And our goal is big. Conserving and restoring 500,000 hectares of forest is ambitious.

But that's just a fraction of what we need to do right now. Just to put things into perspective, the World Resources Institute, they estimated that the amount of forest loss that can be linked to palm oil production globally is already at around six million hect amount of forest loss that can be linked to palm oil production globally is already at around six million hectares of forest loss. Cattle industry? That's at a staggering 45 million hectares. So, again, 500,000 hectares sounds a lot,

and it is a lot, it is ambitious, given the amount of resources that we need to mobilize. But it should be seen as a starting point of what is possible if actors across the supply chain, working collectively and agree to finance the conservations and the restorations of our natural ecosystem, proportionate to their footprint.

The climate-regulating function of a forest is called an ecosystem services. And I'm sure other surfaces that you have in your life, you must be paying for that, right? So our money, your money, should not just be paying for the raw ingredients that we use every day. Our money should be able to pay for the preservations of the natural ecosystem that we all depend on. And what we want to do is to replicate this across other supply chains.

So maybe we have a fashion collective or a rubber collective. And maybe only then we might have a chance to close that financing gap and have a real fighting chance to address the climate crisis. Thank you. (*Applause*) That was Andika Putra Datama at TED Countdown's Dilemma event in Brussels in 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the Ted Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faisi-Bogan, additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with

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