Palm oil has been widely criticised for its high environmental impacts, leading to calls to
replace it with alternative vegetable oils in food and cosmetic products. However,
substituting palm oil would be environmentally beneficial only if the environmental footprint
per litre oil were lower than those of alternative vegetable oils. Whether this is the case is not
obvious, given the high oil yields of oil palm of up to 10 times those of alternative crops.
Here, we combine global agricultural and environmental datasets to show that, among the …