Report of 6,100 orangutans killed denied

KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD) has strongly refuted and disagreed with a report which claimed that 6,100 orangutans were killed in Sabah between 1999 and 2015.

The research that was published for the March 2018 edition of Current Biology journal authored by Maria Voigt and co-authored, among others, by Dr Marc Ancrenaz of HUTAN who is based in Sukau, Kinabatangan and Dr Benoit Goossens, director of Danau Girang Field Centre, also alleged between 1999 and 2015, more than 100,000 orangutans were lost mainly due to illegal hunting and deforestation in Borneo.

“Large numbers of orangutans were simply being slaughtered,” said lead researcher Maria Voigt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antraphology, Germany about their research findings which were reported in major newspapers worldwide.

A research findings published in the PLOS journal in 2004 estimated that the population of orangutans in Sabah was 11,000 individuals. At the time of the study, 60% of the orangutan population in Sabah was believed to be living outside of protected areas.

SWD said that it has to be noted that the island of Borneo is made up the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, Brunei and Indonesia’s Kalimantan.

Based on this research findings, SWD said the state government of Sabah took very serious efforts to increase the protection of orangutan population in Sabah by declaring and gazetting more and bigger protected areas. It said in a statement yesterday that there were only 839,385 ha of totally protected areas in Sabah in 1999 but as of September 2017, a total of 1,906,896 ha of Sabah’s forests have been gazetted as totally protected areas, which amount to 27% of Sabah’s land area. This has increased the coverage of orangutan’s protected habitats by 75%.

The Ulu Segama-Malua Sustainable Forest Management Project was established on 15th March 2006 by the state government of Sabah especially to protect and rehabilitate orangutan habitat. The 242,884 ha were reclassified in stages and by 2014, the whole area was gazetted as Class I Protection Forest, said SWD.

According to the department, the state government of Sabah is very determined to protect and conserve all her iconic species in Sabah and therefore determined to achieve her policy target to have 30% of Sabah under totally protected areas by or before 2025.

“All these efforts are directed at protecting Sabah’s rich biodiversity. Almost all of the additional protected areas are also within orangutan habitats.

“Despite these efforts, none have been acknowledged by the authors of the recent study, of which two were non-Malaysian scientists based in Sabah and working with Sabah Wildlife Department and Sabah Forestry Department as contributing factors to the conservation of orangutan in Sabah. Instead, the study, without hard facts and evidence, has misguided the world community to believe that there were 6,100 individuals orangutan killed in Sabah between 1999 and 2015,” said the department.