Interdisciplinarity for a transition towards more sustainable production of palm oil

Sustainability challenges of oil palm expansion in Southeast Asia continue to be high on national and international policy agendas and public debates. This is the result of very rapid increases in palm oil production in the last three decades mainly through land expansion which is facilitated by government policies and market incentives. This was done with the assumption of increasing demand in the future and lucrative financial returns. While the environmental and social impacts of oil palm plantations have been studied in detail, most studies have separately addressed the various impacts, or looked at solutions for one isolated impact or only from one perspective. However, there are many links between impacts and feedback mechanisms, and therefore solutions must take a comprehensive perspective on them. Interdisciplinary approaches and methods can help to provide such a comprehensive perspective by better accounting for links between impacts, scale and time and thereby increase the effectiveness, feasibility and adoption of newly proposed solutions. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of interdisciplinary approaches and methods which have been used and how these approaches and methods can play a role in making palm oil production most sustainable. Our results are based on a literature review and will elaborate on common disciplines covered, methods of integrating disciplines, gaps among regions in interdisciplinary research and the challenges of interdisciplinarity.