Dataset for "Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Has No Detectable Impacts on Plantation Production Efficiency in Malaysia"

This repository contains the code used in the paper "Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Has No Detectable Impacts on Plantation Production Efficiency in Malaysia". The repository is organized as follows: - 1) RSPO_Concessions_Zachlod2025: The folder contains plantation boundaries in shapefile format. The polygons approximate the concession data used in Zachlod et al., 2025. The polygons in Zachlod et al., 2025 were not provided in a data repository or shared upon request. We therefore digitized the boundaries of the study area ourselves. We also used available RSPO certified concession data from the GeoRSPO Portal. - 2) CODE: The folder contains the data and code for generating the results displayed in Figure 2. The folder is organized as follows: o Extract_oil_palm_coverage.js: Google Earth Engine (GEE) code for extracting the oil palm area within the plantation boundaries. Oil palm coverage was produced using a Random Forest and is stored in the GEE image collection “projects/ee-globaloilpalm/assets/_OTHER/ZacholdPaper/NonBareland_2016-2024_selectedTiles”. o Extract_oil_palm_planting_year.js: Google Earth Engine (GEE) code for extracting the oil palm planting year within the plantation boundaries. The year of planting was produced using the method described in Descals et al., 2024 and is stored in the GEE image collection “projects/ee-globaloilpalm/assets/_OTHER/ZacholdPaper/OPage_19902024”. o DATA: The folder contains the csv files exported from the GEE code. These files contain the raw information for generating figure 2. o generate_fig2.m: Matlab code that generates panels a, b, and c in Figure 2. Zachlod, N., Hudecheck, M., Sirén, C., & George, G. (2025). Sustainable palm oil certification inadvertently affects production efficiency in Malaysia. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 200. Meijaard, E., Sheil, D., Unus, N., & Descals, A. (2025). Sustainable Palm Oil Certification Has No Detectable Impacts on Plantation Production Efficiency in Malaysia. Descals, A., Gaveau, D. L., Wich, S., Szantoi, Z., & Meijaard, E. (2024). Global mapping of oil palm planting year from 1990 to 2021. Earth System Science Data, 16(11), 5111-5129.