Published on: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 |
Kuala Lumpur: Wildlife experts in Malaysia on Tuesday cast doubt on a recently published view by an American researcher from Harvard University that orang-utans could be extinct in 20 years.
Thats not a realistic forecast for Sabahs orang-utan population, Dr Geoffrey Davison, the Malaysian Borneo programme director for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told AFP.
Sabah is home to some 13,000 of the red-haired apes, while there are another one or two thousand in Sarawak, he said.
Orang-utans, close kin to humans, are found only on Borneo, which is shared with Indonesia and Brunei, and on the neighbouring Indonesian island of Sumatra. By some estimates, more than 80 per cent of their original habitat has been destroyed.
Harvard University researcher Cheryl Knott wrote in the October issue of National Geographic magazine that orang-utans could disappear within the next 10 to 20 years if the illegal logging that is destroying their habitat is not stopped.
Knott said loggers had infringed on the apes habitat in Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesian Borneo, where she studied the orang-utans.
Some 2,500 orang-utans - about 10 per cent of the worlds remaining wild population of the apes - live in the park.
At the current rate of habitat destruction, orang-utans could be extinct in the wild in 10 to 20 years. We must stop this trend - the alternative is unthinkable, said Knott.
But, said the WWFs Dr Davison: The outlook for orang-utans in Malaysia is brighter than those from certain neighbouring countries.
Sabah has a substantial orang-utan population and I believe the government is serious in tackling problems like illegal logging and so on. So a viable population of orang-utan should continue to exist here.
However, orang-utans everywhere face major challenges and their numbers are declining, he added, stressing that sustainable forestry practices were vital for their survival.
French primatologist Isabelle Lackman-Ancrenaz, of the Kinabatangan Orang-utan Conservation Project in Sabah, told AFP the orang-utan population in Sabah was viable and that state forestry policies give good hope for the survival of the orang-utan.
However, she also warned that the apes continued viability would depend on whether or not commercial forests adopted sustainable forestry practices, as most of Sabahs orang-utans live outside protected reserves. - AFP
