Enhancing Sustainable Palm Oil Production through Green Technology and Digital Innovation: A Framework for Smart and Resilient Agriculture

Abstract

Sustainability pressure on the palm oil sector has intensified faster than the sector’s capacity to demonstrate compliance, and the resulting gap is increasingly informational rather than agronomic. This paper develops an integrative framework linking green technology and digital innovation to sustainable and resilient oil palm production. A narrative synthesis of peer-reviewed literature indexed in Scopus and SINTA between 2015 and 2025 was conducted, covering remote sensing, artificial intelligence, precision fertilisation, biomass recovery, and traceability systems in oil palm and comparable perennial cropping systems. Retrieved studies were coded according to the production function addressed, the technology deployed, the reported performance, and the sustainability dimension affected, and were then organised into an architecture of four interacting layers. The synthesis indicates that sensing and detection technologies have reached high technical maturity, with reported accuracies for automated palm detection and mapping exceeding ninety per cent in several studies, while decision-support and traceability layers remain comparatively underdeveloped and are rarely integrated with agronomic operations. The framework proposed here treats green technology and digital innovation as complementary rather than parallel agendas: sensing generates the evidence base, analytics converts it into agronomic decisions, green technology executes those decisions with reduced resource intensity, and traceability converts the resulting performance into market-recognised claims. The paper argues that resilience emerges from the completeness of this loop rather than from the sophistication of any single component, and identifies smallholder inclusion as the principal condition determining whether the framework delivers sector-wide rather than enterprise-level benefits.