I've covered the plight of Indonesia's orangutans
before, but
an article at MSNBC.com yesterday indicates the situation is even worse than previously thought.
Without urgent action, 98 percent of remaining forests on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo could be gone by 2022, with serious consequences for local people and wildlife including rhinos, tigers and elephants, the U.N. report said
U.N. Environment Program experts, convening on the fringes of a major environmental meeting in Kenya, called the situation a conservation emergency, blaming a "shadowy network of multinational firms for increasingly targeting Indonesian national parks as one of the few remaining sources of commercial timber supplies."
This comes back to supply and demand (and greed). China, the U.S., and the EU are the three largest markets for Indonesian timber. In order to end this devastation, Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia's environment minister, has appealed "to the conscience of the whole world: do not buy uncertified wood."
He said illegal logging was ravaging 37 of his country's 41 national parks, and now accounted for more than 73 percent of all logging in Indonesia.
"It is not being done by individual impoverished people, but by well-organized elusive commercial networks," said Achim Steiner, head of the UNEP.
These networks hire well-armed mercenary thugs against which under-funded and under-equipped response ranger teams are no match.
While the U.S. has already agreed to a pact ensuring Indonesian imports are all legally acquired, the EU is only just getting started in negotiations, and China has yet to come to the table. But time is of the essence:
The U.N. report, which was compiled using new satellite images and Indonesian government data, said orangutan habitat was being lost 30 percent quicker than was previously feared.
It was estimated in 2002 that there were about 60,000 of the shaggy ginger primates left in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. Some ecologists say the number has now been halved and others say the species could be extinct in 20 years.
Please, do not buy uncertified wood or palm oil products unsustainably produced in Indonesia. These things are not necessary to us, but that habitat is important to the orangutans and other species, including the local people.
Labels: environment, orangutans, primates, wildlife
Planet ArkAlready suffering from the loss of approximately
one thousand lives in forest fires this year, Indonesia's beleaguered orangutans are apparently facing the threat of worse El Nino conditions in the region next year, according to ecologists:
Willie Smits, founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, said if intentional burning of forest was not prevented, Indonesia would face a terrible haze season next year.
"If we are looking at an El Nino which has a cooling in the Indian Ocean and a warming up in the Pacific Ocean, these are exactly the conditions that occurred in 1982-83 and 1997-98. Those were the two worst El Nino disasters. Next year we could look at a new world record," he said.
"Having a rainy season is not going to solve it. We could look at new problems as early as April next year," he said. "If these orangutans are to survive, we better deal with the fire situation in the coming years."
The annual fires are often deliberately lit by timber and palm oil plantation firms or farmers in Borneo and Indonesia's Sumatra island to clear land for cultivation, many of them in the same forests where the orangutans live.
Smits called the orangutan popultions "extremely threatened," saying that "The forest has to be intact in one big piece for a population as a total to survive."
Labels: emergency rescue, environment, orangutans, wildlife
MSNBC.com | World EnvironmentI'm exhausted right now, so don't expect anything terribly insightful from me, but here are some quotes from the article that struck me deeply:
In 2002, it was estimated there were 56,000 orangutans in the wild but the population has dwindled at a rate of 6,000 a year, conservationists say. Ed Wray / APA rescued orangutan peers out of a temporary holding cage Monday in Mantangai, Indonesia.
Nearly 90 percent of their habitat has been destroyed by illegal logging and slash-and-burn farming practices. If the rate of deforestation continues, orangutans will disappear from the wild in around a decade, experts say.
A decade. Unless more is done to stop this, there's no way these orangutans will survive.
The next quote lets people know what they can do:
Most of the annual dry season fires are deliberately lit by farmers or at the behest of timber and oil palm plantation companies.
In other words, end the global demand for timber and palm oil, and you may save the orangutans. Doesn't sound too hopeful, does it?
Jennifer Miller is covering the disaster at the
IFAW blog:
Labels: emergency rescue, endangered species, environment, orangutans, wildlife
