Regimes of global and national oil palm cultivations from 2001 to 2018

•Tree age is introduced for global and national oil palm suitability assessment.•Other regions have lower proportion of suitable area than Southeast Asia.•Differences in industrial and smallholder oil palm are less obvious than expected.•Market factors and local policies play important role in oil palm production. Oil palm is the dominant global oil crop due to its high productivity and diversified usage in many sectors. Since the late 20th century, oil palm cultivations proliferated in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Latin America. However, global market factors, different national and regional policies, and smallholder versus commercial planting regimes in different areas lead to significant differences in economic benefits and environmental problems from deforestation and loss of biodiversity. We investigated changes in global and national distributions against suitability and indices of tree age distribution change for industrial oil palm (IOP) and smallholder oil palm (SOP). Spatial and temporal change analyses show that: i) For most tree ages, the proportion of global oil palm planting in suitable areas was less than 50%, but the impact of temporal regimes, from possible market factors and local policies, on planting structure should not be neglected; ii) Central America, South America, and West Africa were less suitable for oil palm cultivation compared to Southeast Asia. While, as two dominant oil palm planting countries, Indonesia and Malaysia had relatively low planting suitability, with 39.23% of Indonesia’s IOP, 44.85% of Indonesia’s SOP, 30.90% of Malaysia’s IOP and 18.77% of Malaysia’s SOP in highly and most suitable intervals; iii) There exist clear differences between IOP and SOP in terms of suitability, planting structure and spatial expansion patterns; iv) Hysteresis effect exists between latecomers (countries in West Africa and Latin America) and forerunner (Indonesia and Malaysia) in terms of spatial expansion; v) The spatial expansion patterns of oil palm planting centers have obvious scale effects for both IOP and SOP, with clear inter-country and intra-country differences. This paper reinterprets the global distribution of tree age and spatial expansion pattern and recommends scientific strategies to guide site selection and planting structure that enable oil palm cultivation for sustainable development.