Seventy percent of wild orangutans currently live outside protected areas. (JG Photo/Safir Makki)
BALIKPAPAN, EAST KALIMANTAN: Officials plan to open a new orangutan rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan later this year, as part of efforts to release all apes being held at such centers into the wild by 2015.
Novianto Bambang, the Forestry Ministry’s director of biodiversity conservation, said on Monday that with 70 percent of wild orangutans living outside protected areas, the number of the endangered apes coming into conflict with humans remained high, thus making it crucially important to have more rehabilitation centers.
He said the new center would be built on 50 hectares of land in North Penajam Paser district, and will join the Samboja Lestari facility, just north of Balikpapan. This will be the second orangutan rehabilitation center run by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) in East Kalimantan.
The new center will have the capacity to hold 50 orangutans.
Three other rehabilitation centers for orangutan operate in other parts of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo Island, including the BOS’s Nyaru Menteng center in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan; the Orangutan Foundation International’s Camp Leakey at Tanjung Puting National Park in West Kotawaringin district, Central Kalimantan; and the International Animal Rescue’s conservation center in Ketapang, West Kalimantan.
Novianto said that with the new center set to open later this year, it was hoped that the various conservation groups would be able to complete the release of all the apes they were currently holding by 2015.
“Of the 300 to 400 orangutans that to date have been successfully released back into the wild in Kalimantan, we can be thankful that none have died, according to the information from their tracking chips,” he said.
“So we’re optimistic that the remaining 700 or so orangutans still being kept at rehabilitation centers can all be released into the wild by 2015, even though we face difficulty finding suitable habitats for them. ”
Hardi Biaktiantoro, the director of the Center for Orangutan Protection, an activist group, said there were an estimated 58,500 of the apes remaining in the wild in Kalimantan, most of them in West, Central and South Kalimantan.
Only around 4,800 are believed to remain in East Kalimantan, “The orangutan population in East Kalimantan continues to decline along with the conversion of forested land for other uses,” Hardi said.
“The number of the apes now that lost their habitats is high,” he said. “That’s why we desperately need a second rehabilitation center here, because the current one is overwhelmed.”