Over the last 15 years, many studies have been published on the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon footprint of palm oil. Different methodological approaches were used, in particular to account for GHG emissions from land use (LU) and land use change (LUC). In Europe, there has been a heated debate for many years with a focus on direct and indirect land use change (dLUC / iLUC) resulting from oil crops that are used for biofuels and also for food products.

There is no doubt that the GHG emissions from land use are significant and must be taken into account. A novel scientific approach presented here is the attributional land use and land use change (aLULUC). It is based on the principle that the current actual conditions of land use change and the associated GHG emissions in a specific country are equally attributed to all its agricultural products. It implicitly covers potential indirect land use changes. Thus, the aLULUC approach represents a significant improvement in the iLUC debate since it does not depend on theoretically modelling of iLUC emissions, but uses the actual emissions of recent years instead.

The presentation provides an introduction into the methodological approach of the aLULUC concept in contrast to the dLUC and iLUC approach and presents results for five major vegetable oils, namely rape seed oil, canola oil, soy oil, sunflower oil and palm oil, followed by conclusions and recommendations.