Threats
Four pressures, acting all at once.
Deforestation, fires, poaching and the illegal pet trade. None of them acts alone, and each one makes the others worse.
50%
of supermarket packaged goods contain it
Threat 01
Palm Oil
The crop that replaced the forest
Oil palm is grown on land that was rainforest. Lowland forest — exactly the habitat orangutans depend on — is the cheapest and most productive to convert, so it goes first.
When a plantation replaces a forest, it does not simply shrink the range. It fragments it. Orangutans left in isolated pockets cannot reach the fruiting trees they need, cannot find mates, and increasingly come into contact with people who regard them as pests.
Palm oil is not going away. What can change is where it is grown and how it is certified — which is why demand-side pressure from countries like Australia matters.
585,400 ha
of primary forest lost each year, 2010–2019
Threat 02
Deforestation
Sixty-eight rugby fields an hour
Between 2010 and 2019 Indonesia lost an average of 585,400 hectares of humid primary forest every year — the equivalent of about 68 full-size rugby fields every hour, around the clock.
Logging, mining and agricultural conversion all take their share. The roads cut to reach the timber then open the interior to everything that follows: settlement, hunting, and further clearing.
Habitat destruction is the single largest threat to the viability of the remaining wild orangutan population in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Months
that peatland fires can smoulder below the surface
Threat 03
Fire
Peat that burns underground
Fire is used to clear land cheaply. On drained peatland it does not stop where it was lit — peat holds carbon metres deep and can burn underground for months, resurfacing far from where it started.
Orangutans are slow, arboreal and territorial. They do not outrun a fire front. Those that survive emerge into burnt ground with no food, and move into villages and plantations where they are frequently killed.
Every major fire season is followed by a wave of orphaned infants arriving at our sanctuaries.
1 : 1
a mother is killed for every infant taken
Threat 04
Illegal Wildlife Trade & Poaching
An infant is worth more than a life
Infant orangutans are taken for the pet trade. Because a mother will not surrender her young, taking an infant almost always means killing an adult female — the single most valuable individual in a slow-breeding population.
Others are killed as agricultural pests, or hunted for meat. The trade moves live animals across borders and out of the region entirely.
Every orangutan confiscated from the trade arrives without the skills a wild mother spends eight years teaching. Rebuilding those skills is what Forest School exists to do.
Bornean subspecies
Three subspecies, three different trajectories.
Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus
Western Kalimantan, Sarawak
1,500–3,500
The most endangered of the three.
Pongo pygmaeus morio
Northeast Sabah, East Kalimantan
8,000–18,000
Adapted to the harshest, driest forests.
Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii
Central Kalimantan
~40,000
The most plentiful subspecies.