Peaceful coexistence key for orangutans
KOTA KINABALU: Peaceful coexistence between people and orangutans outside protected areas including oil palm, timber, acacia, rubber landscapes is necessary to maintain a genetically healthy and viable wild population in Borneo according to a new scientific article published in the Journal ‘Frontiers in Forests and Global Change'.
Since 2008, researchers have found that orangutans are travelling through varied forest and farm type landscapes to find food and mates as they use forest patches in non-protected areas as a critical linkage to protected forest.
“Realising that orang-utans are surviving and even raising offspring in small forest patches came as a surprise to us initially, but our studies have shown these intelligent great apes are quite creative at crossing estates, often undetected, to disperse from one forest patch to another,” stated Felicity Oram one of the co-authors and Project Director for Palm Oil and NGO (PONGO) Alliance.
The peer-reviewed paper was written by a group of orangutan researchers together with oil palm plantations based in Indonesia and Malaysia which included PT Austindo Nusantara Jaya Tbk (ANJ), United Plantations and Wilmar International, conservationists including members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Orangutan Specialist Group, Primate Specialist Group Section on Human – Primate Interactions, IUCN Oil Palm Task Force and members of the multistakeholder PONGO Alliance.
Lead author, Marc Ancrenaz of HUTAN, a community-based organisation working with the Sabah Wildlife Department in the Kinabatangan, emphasised this is the way forward to ensure that the orangutans in Borneo can survive and thrive.
“Latest available estimates show that at least 10,000 orangutans are surviving in these mixed mosaic forest-plantation landscapes. Thus, we must work together with industries that are operating in these non-protected areas to ensure that orang-utans and some other keystone species like Bornean elephants have adequate passage and safety. This means having patches of forest and corridors across these landscapes transformed by human activities.”
According to Jeremy Goon, Chief Sustainability Officer of Wilmar International and PONGO Alliance partner, “We observed that orangutans and other wildlife species use mixed landscapes, including oil palm estates such as ours, and recognised the opportunity for us to invest towards the protection of wildlife in these landscapes. We are pleased to know that conserving forest patches in oil palm operations have had a significant impact on the populations of orangutan and other wildlife. We will also continue to support the research and activities by organisations such as the PONGO Alliance, who continue to exhibit positive progress towards these conservation efforts in Borneo.”
Oram, reiterated Goon's perspective, “With genuine participation and effort, the oil palm industry can greatly improve the chances healthy wild orangutan populations can still survive in Borneo and Sumatra, I strongly encourage them to reach out to us via PONGO Alliance.”