I am a second year DPhil student here at ECI looking at environmental governance and monitoring of Malaysian oil palm.  My interest in this topic primarily has to do with the use of palm oil for biofuels and what would be the carbon balance of using a vegetable oil produced from cleared rainforest.  The answer to this question is far from simple, mainly because it is not always the case that intact, primary forest is being converted. Often it is already degraded, due to illegal logging, other forms of plantation cultivation (e.g. timber or rubber), forest fires, abandonement, etc.  (You can see my departmental web-page here: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/teaching/doctoral/morelalex.php.)

There are efforts underway to provide more transparency and accountability to the palm oil industry, namely the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).  You can find more information on this project from this link: http://www.rspo.org.  I will be attending the next roundtable, RT5, in Kuala Lumpur from Nov 20-22: so watch this space for updates from the field!

 Before working on palm oil, I have done research on other forms of biofuel. My MSc dissertation, which I also did through ECI, was on the sustainability certification of jatropha production in India. You can see a poster I presented at the Sustainable Development Research Network (SDRN) Young Scientist Poster Competition here: http://admin.sd-research.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/alexandramorelposter.pdf. 

 Before returning to academia I spent a year and a half working on environmental and energy policy at the environmental and energy study institute (EESI) in Washington, DC.  I was a policy analyst on agriculture and energy issues, which gave me my first taste of biofuels and the range of people and issues it overlaps.

 I am quite fascinated by the sheer complexity of biofuels and the collective effort taking place to more fully understand the impacts and implications of serious expansion of biofuel production. I do hope that my blogs will elicit some feedback from interested readers, as I am always happy to discuss this highly controversial... sometimes emotional... ever-evolving topic!

Comments

Posted by broofpittsburghelite on 5th Nov 2007 00:15 (11 months, 1 week ago):

yo alexandra, i hope malaysia is sweet, i had some malaysian food called nasi goreng, it was bomb, you should see if you can score some.

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