Palm oil is in nearly half of all packaged consumer goods. Its production drives tropical deforestation that destroys habitat for orangutans, tigers, pygmy elephants, and hundreds of other species.
Palm oil deforestation is a welfare emergency for hundreds of species whose habitat is destroyed as forest gives way to plantation monoculture. The welfare harms are diverse and severe: animals killed during forest clearing through burning, macheting, or drowning in drainage canals; animals displaced into shrinking forest fragments with insufficient food, territory, and social partners; juvenile animals orphaned when parents are killed; and long-term population-level welfare degradation from fragmentation. Orangutans suffer particularly severely: slow-reproducing, intelligent, and highly dependent on large continuous forest, they cannot adapt to plantation landscapes. The certification landscape is complex — RSPO certification represents a meaningful but imperfect standard. Consumer pressure for genuinely deforestation-free supply chains, combined with government land use policy in producing countries, represents the most effective lever for change.