Year: 2026 | Month: May | Volume: 13 | Issue: 5 | Pages: 129-155
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260511
Environmental Damage and Environmental Ethics in Oil Palm Plantation Expansion: Ecological Degradation, Justice, and Circular Transition Pathways in Indonesia and the Global Palm Oil Economy
Marcellino Christofel Mambu1, Sukirman Rahim2, Abdul Haris Panai3, Marini Susanti Hamidun4
1Doctoral Program in Environmental Science, Gorontalo State University, Gorontalo, Indonesia.
2,3,4Postgraduate Program, Gorontalo State University, Gorontalo, Indonesia.
Corresponding Author: Marcellino Christofel Mambu
ABSTRACT
Oil palm is frequently defended on the grounds of exceptional land productivity, foreign-exchange earnings, and its growing role in food, oleochemical, and biofuel markets. Yet the same production system has become one of the most contested agro-industrial frontiers of the twenty-first century because plantation expansion, mill waste generation, peat conversion, and socio-spatial asymmetries can transfer large environmental costs to forests, soils, waterways, workers, and rural communities. Building on the attached review of oil palm biomass and integrating the recent literature extracted in file containing plain-text abstracts of newer publications, this article develops a critical review that centers environmental damage and environmental ethics rather than viewing palm oil only through the lens of technical efficiency or biomass valorization. The review argues that oil palm sustainability cannot be judged solely by yield per hectare, certification uptake, or downstream circular-economy initiatives. A more adequate assessment must combine ecological evidence on deforestation, biodiversity simplification, hydrological disruption, climate forcing, air pollution, and palm oil mill effluent with ethical questions of land rights, recognition, procedural justice, labor conditions, intergenerational responsibility, and the risk of burden shifting. The recent literature shows real progress in waste conversion, biochar, effluent treatment, industrial symbiosis, and low-carbon material substitution, but it also shows that technical mitigation is ethically incomplete when expansion reproduces unequal control over land, inadequate compensation, weak worker protection, or insufficient Free, Prior and Informed Consent. The article proposes an integrated framework in which no-deforestation production, peat protection, rights-based governance, transparent value distribution, and carefully bounded circular bioeconomy strategies are treated as mutually reinforcing rather than optional. Such a synthesis is necessary if oil palm landscapes are to move from extractive efficiency toward ecologically restorative and ethically legitimate sustainability.
Keywords: oil palm plantations; environmental damage; environmental ethics; deforestation; biodiversity loss; palm oil waste; climate justice
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