Southeast Asia Holds the Key to Nature-Positive Palm Oil

The world has less than four years left to reach the 30×30 target, protecting at least 30 per cent of land and ocean by 2030, as agreed under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Progress is falling short of expectations; protected areas cover only 17.6 per cent of the world’s terrestrial and inland-water biodiversity, and 8.4 per cent of marine and coastal areas.

Protected areas alone cannot close this gap. Agriculture covers nearly 40 per cent of the world’s habitable land, and some of it holds high-value conservation areas in near-natural condition. Extending the nature-positive approach, defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as the reversal of nature loss by 2030 to achieve full recovery by 2050, to farming and plantations — not only protected areas — would be more impactful. This would entail measurably halting and reversing biodiversity loss over the next five years, and fully restoring a 2020 baseline by 2050. 

Palm oil has the greatest opportunity to apply the approach. Habitats that are valuable for conservation, such as peatlands and river ecosystems, are often located within plantations or along their borders. By 2026, producers certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) had maintained at least 27,825 hectares of conserved peatland, more than 172,000 hectares of riparian buffers, and thousands of hectares of high conservation value (HCV) and high carbon stock (HCS) areas, thus expanding the capacity of these areas to function as wildlife corridors linking fragmented forests. Certification schemes such as the RSPO establish baseline environmental requirements for plantations, including prohibitions on deforestation and peatland clearing, but the nature–positive approach, by requiring measurable improvement in the ecological commons, could compel broader coordination among plantation operators and governments.

Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce about 85 per cent of the world’s palm oil, are piloting conservation plans that encompass broad landscapes, protecting rivers, peatlands, and habitats regardless of land ownership. These stewardship efforts must cohere with the reality that ecosystems and biodiversity transcend ownership boundaries.

Southeast Asia is in a strategic position. The region is not merely a participant in the shift to nature-positive palm oil, but can play a decisive role in mobilising and incentivising the sector to be a part of global conservation solutions. Realising these goals requires strong policy support in three areas.

First, governments should recognise conservation-managed plantation areas under the Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECM) framework, which oversees long-term, effective biodiversity conservation outside of formal protected areas. Companies could demonstrate that eligible plantation areas meet agreed conservation and no-deforestation criteria, allowing these areas to be formally recognised as OECMs and potentially counted towards national 30×30 targets. This could provide governments with a mechanism to formally recognise, monitor and report conservation contributions made within privately managed agricultural landscapes.

Stringency and integrity in implementation will be key. Eligibility should require independent verification of secure long-term protection rather than one-off declarations, and should involve national conservation agencies working alongside certifiers such as RSPO. It must not become a way to launder past deforestation into green credentials.

A credible design would tie eligibility to a fixed cut-off date to mark out the start of compliance with no-deforestation baselines and the prohibition of land clearing. This mechanism would also phase in recognition over several years of demonstrated protection rather than granting it immediately, so credentials are earned, not awarded upfront. It should also require publicly disclosed and clearly mapped plantation boundaries that can be checked against satellite deforestation data.

Recognition should reward land protected despite pressure to clear it. Progress itself should be tracked against clear, comparable rubrics that encompass forest and peat cover change, HCV/HCS integrity, species-occupancy and connectivity indices, and peat water-table depth. The results must be verified periodically through independent assessments and national biodiversity monitoring, and consistently measured against the relevant baselines.

If Southeast Asia gets this right, it secures both its market position and a genuine claim to shaping global conservation.

Second, support for smallholders, who supply nearly half of Southeast Asia’s palm oil, must be scaled up and realistically tailored to smallholders’ capacity. Corporate plantations can absorb HCV/HCS assessments and dedicated conservation units; most smallholders cannot. For them, nature-positive practice looks more like retaining riparian buffers and forest patches, adopting integrated pest management, and replanting with agroforestry buffers — changes that need financing and replanting support, not compliance audits. Government-backed credit tied to conservation covenants, and simplified group certification under national schemes like Indonesia’s ISPO and Malaysia’s MSPO, are the policy levers that make nature-positive practices affordable for smallholders.

Third, the region needs shared nature-positive standards developed through ASEAN and major palm oil-producing countries, including through platforms such as the Council of Palm Oil Producing Countries (CPOPC). This could provide a regional approach that reflects Southeast Asia’s ecological and production realities while complementing global standards. Within each country, joint OECM accreditation panels and shared land-use planning could replace parallel policies and create a common framework for governments and companies. Both would then work towards a shared metric: the number of hectares of production landscapes that have been independently verified as effectively conserving biodiversity.

This framework would naturally be led by Indonesia and Malaysia, but should, from the start, include other Southeast Asian countries that have smallholder palm oil, such as Thailand and the Philippines. Both have far smaller planted areas and less certification infrastructure, so bringing them along would also require technical and financial assistance, and mutual recognition of national schemes, letting them opt into shared standards without absorbing the full compliance costs designed for the region’s two largest producers.

The 30×30 target will not be met by expanding protected areas alone. Agricultural production landscapes, long treated as sources of environmental damage, must become part of the solution, with credit given only where conservation is verified, sustained, and additional to what would have happened anyway. If Southeast Asia gets this right, it secures both its market position and a genuine claim to shaping global conservation. The clock is ticking toward 2030; change must start in the agricultural landscapes that have been neglected.

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This commentary is written in the author’s personal capacity.