Coconut oil, conservation and the conscientious consumer.

Consumption has consequences, and conscientious consumers increasingly seek sound guidance to reduce their impact. Objective guidance is, however, rarely available. A case in point is coconut production which is generally considered to have low environmental impact. We demonstrate that for one impact measure of all major oil crops —threatened species per volume produced —coconut, together with maize, affect far more species than all other major oil crops, including palm oil. Our analysis indicates that the public discourse about crop impact is distorted. What ethical consumers need is unbiased information based on transparent and objective measures that address multiple concerns, costs and impacts, and allow fair comparisons between products.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Current Biology

• Publication date

  2020-01-31

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Business, Environmental Science, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.31235/osf.io/du5tpPMID 32810444
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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