New findings by the Borneo Conservation Trust (BCT) show that orangutans are surviving in pockets of forest within the oil palm plantations in Sabah and that it is possible for the orangutans to travel and live within the plantations.

“This initial finding is part of the effort to realise our goal towards creating a contiguous forest within the landscape and thus will benefit a wider range for wildlife habitat and movement,” said BCT Chief Executive Officer, Cyril Pinso.

BCT has been commissioned by Malaysia Palm Oil Corporation (MPOC) to undertake a survey of the orangutan population in Sabah, including those residing within oil palm plantations.

Pinso said recent reports that majority of the isolated orangutans in the Kinabatangan area would go extinct in less than 50 years if nothing is done is true.

BCT is a state-mandated tax-exempt NGO established in 2006, and promoted by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Environment. It was incorporated under the Trustee’s Ordinance 1951, Cap. 148 (Sabah), to deal with the pressing needs to preserve the habitat and the migration route of Borneo’s most endangered wildlife along the Kinabatangan and the Segama Rivers.

This migration route referred to as BCT Green Corridor is part and parcel of BCT’s mission.

As a first token step, BCT has bought five acres in the Kinabatangan area to connect this corridor, supported by funds from Japanese individuals.

At the same time, it also raised awareness to deal with the continuing challenges concerning our conservation efforts for the benefit of wildlife and the environment, including restoring Malaysia’s image in the oil palm industry.

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The Orangutan Conservancy, which helped broker the negotiations with Hollywood animal trainers that resulted in the donation this week of six orangutans to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, hailed the deal as a positive step for conservation.

The first two orangutans – a 19-year old female named Katy (pictured above) and her three-year old son, Rocky – arrived at the Des Moines, Iowa, facility on July 12. The remaining four will follow over the course of the summer.

“This is wonderful news, not only for the orangutans that worked in entertainment, but also for wild orangutans in Indonesia,” said Norm Rosen, president of the Orangutan Conservancy. “The idea of laughing at an orangutan in a television commercial or a greeting card might seem harmless, but there is a very direct correlation between the way we view orangutans in America or Europe and the way they are perceived in Southeast Asia.”

Added Rosen: “The sooner we stop regarding orangutans as props, the sooner we’ll be able to make effective arguments to the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia to protect them and the forests in which they live.”

The six orangutans – two males and four females – were donated to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa by Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, which was the last major supplier of trained orangutans for television, films and advertising. Rocky was generally regarded as the most visible orangutan in media today, having appeared in recent television advertisements for Capital One and Aflac and an Elle magazine spread with pop star Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas.
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JAKARTA — The leaders of Indonesia and Brazil have agreed that their developing nations, home to much of the world’s remaining tropical forest, would cooperate on biofuels after talks covering climate change and food.

The two nations signed an agreement on July 12 for Indonesia to send experts to Brazil to study its biofuel developments, said Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

“Brazil has been successful developing bioethanol and of course Indonesia can learn from the research and development,” Yudhoyono told a news conference after talks with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Brazil, a pioneer of mass ethanol usage in cars, has been mixing the sugar cane-based fuel with gasoline for decades, as well as running a vast fleet of vehicles on pure ethanol.

Indonesia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer, has also been pushing biofuels to cut the use of costly petroleum products, and aims to make mandatory the use of a 2.5 percent blend of biodiesel by September. Indonesia’s forests in Sumatra and Borneo are home to the world’s last remaining wild populations of orangutans.

The biofuel sector has come under attack from green groups for accelerating the destruction of forests, while some analysts blame it for contributing to soaring world food prices by diverting land that could be used for food crops.
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The Government of Indonesia will lodge a formal protest against Yale University over its newly released environmental performance index (EPI) report, which ranked Indonesia among the world’s least environmentally friendly countries.

The university’s EPI report, published in Newsweek’s July 7-14 edition, ranked Indonesia 102nd out of 149 countries, mainly because of widespread deforestation.

State Minister for the Environment Rachmat Witoelar said the data used in the report was out of date.

“The report is not fair. It is absurd because all the data is invalid. I will send my special staff to Yale to protest their researchers,” he said.

Amanda Katili, the ministry’s special expert on climate change, will leave for the United States on Monday.

“I will present Yale researchers with the new forestry data. This data is available at the Forestry Ministry website and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) website,” Amanda told The Jakarta Post on Saturday. “It is the researchers’ own fault if they don’t understand Bahasa Indonesia. They could have contacted us for the latest data before publishing the EPI ranking.”

The report claimed 85 percent of Indonesia’s carbon emissions came from deforestation.

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 “Where the two biggest carbon emitters, China and the United States, have coal plants and cars to blame, the No. 3 culprit — Indonesia — produces 85 percent of its carbon emissions from forest,” the report in Newsweek said.

It said forests were almost wiped out on heavily populated Java, while Sumatra lost 35 percent of its forests and Kalimantan lost 19 percent in the 1990s. Deforestation is also threatening the Sumatran rhinoceros and orangutan with extinction.

“In the forestry component of Yale and Columbia’s Environmental Performance Index, Indonesia comes in last with a score of zero,” it said.

The 2008 EPI ranks 149 countries on 25 indicators, and tracks six established policy categories: environmental health, air pollution, water resources, biodiversity and habitat, productive natural resources and climate change.

Indonesia has 120 million hectares of rain forest.

The deforestation rate between 1987 and 1997 was 1.8 million hectares annually. From 1998 to 2000, it rose sharply to 2.8 million hectares per year because of severe forest fires, before falling back to 1.8 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2006.

Forestry watchdog Greenomics Indonesia also protested the report for putting Malaysia in 26th place.

“Indonesia’s forests along the border with Malaysia in Kalimantan have long been the main source of timber for illegal loggers from Malaysia,” Greenomics executive director Elfian Effendi told the Post.

He said the world’s biggest importers of wood, including the United States, the European Union and Japan, bought most of their wood products from Malaysia and China.

“It is common knowledge wood in Malaysia and China comes from Indonesian forests. So why are these countries, which exploit our forests, considered more environmentally friendly?” he said.

(Source: The Jakarta Post)