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Another day and there’s another study that undermines the case for biofuels as an eco-friendly source of energy. This time it’s the booming palm oil plantations of Southeast Asia, which yield the raw ingredients for biodiesel, used most often in Europe. Activists have been warning for some time that the growth of palm oil is leading to deforestation in Southeast Asia, where forested land has often been cleared to build palm plantations. Malaysia and Indonesia produce 87% of the world’s palm oil, and the combined harvested area for oil palm has reached 6.5 million hectares (ha), up fourfold from 1990 levels.

That’s an environmental threat that has impacts both local and global. Deforestation can lead to the loss of habitat for species that depend on the forest, and the cutting down and burning of trees worldwide is responsible for some 15% of global carbon emissions.

Now a study on palm oil plantations published in the March 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms what environmentalists have feared: palm oil plantations create deforestation and hurt biodiversity. Researchers from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich and the National University of Singapore looked at oil-palm plantations in peninsular Malaysia, Borneo and Sumatra and found that 880,000 ha of tropical peatlnad-about 6% of the total territory-had been converted to palm oil plantations by the early years of the last decade.

That conversion has led to biodiversity loss that ranges from 1% in Borneo to 12.1% in peninsular Malaysia-equivalent to the extinction of some 46 species. Carbon was emitted in the land-use changes as well-some 140 million metric tons of carbon were added to the atmosphere thanks to the clearing of existing forests, even as the loss of those peatland forests further reduced the ability of the landscape to sequester carbon.