THE $80 MILLION QUESTION

The world spends a huge amount of money on orangutan conservation every year but their numbers are still declining. What’s going on, why isn’t palm oil to blame and what can we do to arrest the downward curve?

- James Fair

According to Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist who has been working for almost 30 years in South-East Asia, the world spends $80 million (about £60 million) a year on orangutan conservation. Erik and a number of colleagues are currently trying to determine exactly where this money goes. “We are looking at who is spending it – governments, NGOs, research organisations, sanctuaries, oil and timber companies, where the money comes from and what it is being invested in, and whether we can link that spending to local orangutan population trends,” he tells me during a video call from Brunei, where he lives for much of the year.

Though Erik’s research is unfinished, there’s one thing he can say with certainty. “What is clear is that we are spending all that money but we are still losing orangutans.” In other words, it’s not working.

Orangutans live on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra, and are correspondingly separate species. There is also a third species, the Tapanuli orangutan, also found on Sumatra (see p55). Here are the broad-brush figures: in 2016, the IUCN estimated Bornean orangutan numbers at just over 100,000 (a figure forecast to drop to 47,000 by 2025), with about 15.5 million hectares of available habitat. Sumatran orangutans, in contrast, are considerably rarer, with an estimated 14,000 individuals contained within a much smaller area, mainly the Leuser Ecosystem, a 2.6 million hectare swathe (that’s 1.3 times the size of Wales) of rainforest in the island’s north.

Borneo and Sumatra may be very different in terms of the status and conservation of their resident orangutans, but they do have one thing in common: neither are having much success in safeguarding these apes.