Blogs: Environment

As someone working in sustainability communications in GAR, I am often awed by the sheer scale of the challenges we face in setting up and running sustainable operations. These could range from how we find long-term solutions to forest fires and haze to how to convince and get the communities to come on board on joint conservation efforts. And sometimes it feels like no one out there truly appreciates what we are doing on the ground to make our palm oil production sustainable.

So it was extremely gratifying to discover that GAR is ranked fourth by SPOTT (Sustainable Palm Oil Transparency Toolkit) in their scorecard of sustainable palm oil companies. SPOTT is a project from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to provide practical information and resources to stakeholders in the palm oil industry, in order to reduce its negative environment impacts.

Company Scores

Source: SPOTT
* Scores have been weighted

The palm oil sector is often attacked for not being sustainable – it’s accused of causing widespread deforestation, harming orangutan habitats and of course blamed for the haze. Yet few people are aware that many major palm oil companies have conservation and sustainability policies. In fact, since GAR led the way in 2011 with its Forest Conservation Policy, many big players have followed suit.

At GAR, we’re concentrating on making sustainability part of our everyday business. There are now 126 people at Head Office in Jakarta and 189 on the ground working on making sure that sustainability is no longer seen as something extra we do, but something that is part of everything we do.

We were the first to adopt a Forest Conservation Policy in 2011, and last year we were also the first to put out an updated sustainability policy version 2.0 – the GAR Social and Environmental Policy (GSEP). Nearly 2,000 employees have been trained on GSEP implementation as part of our efforts to make sustainability an integral part of our business.

To tackle fires and haze, we have launched a pilot programme focusing on long-term prevention and helping villages to move away from traditional methods of clearing land with fire. We’re helping to equip and train them to prevent fires and we’ll back it up with CSR support for villages that remain fire-free.

We’ve also finished a major exercise mapping our downstream supply chain. It means that we are increasing our outreach and engagement with nearly 500 suppliers, and we can tell them that when it comes to sustainability, we’ve been there, done that and here’s a possible solution. After all, there’s no point just being sustainable on our own – that’s only half the battle – we want to bring our whole supply chain with us on this journey and in the process contribute to making the industry better.

At the plantation, we’ve stopped using paraquat since January this year. We’re carrying out a peat rehabilitation project in PT AMNL in West Kalimantan, aimed at preventing a peat area of around 2,600 hectares from drying out and becoming combustible. More importantly we’re trying to get the local community there to agree to jointly conserve the area with us so that it is not disturbed in the future. Concentrating on peat rehabilitation is important as peat fires are the primary cause of haze, and perhaps this project can become an example of how to manage peat properly.

What’s in store for the future? Keep reading this space. For now, I’ll end with this message to my colleagues in sustainability – your efforts are being noticed, so keep up the good work!