The Endangered Population of Orangutan

The only arboreal Great Ape is the orangutan; all other species, including gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, spend the majority of their time on the ground. Orangutans’ ancestral range once extended from Southern China to the island of Java. They still exist today, albeit in very small numbers, solely in the remote Indonesian archipelago, specifically on Sumatra and Borneo.

Threats to orangutans come from numerous directions, including poaching and the conversion of forests into unsustainable monocultures. Orangutans are the slowest reproducing species in the world, making them extremely vulnerable to extinction. If we do nothing, the species may go extinct in the next ten years. There won’t be enough residual woods to support the populations necessary to prevent the extinction of orangutans if they are not protected from both legal and illegal unsustainable monocultures like oil palm or rubber plantations.

Leif Cocks, a prominent primatologist and the founder of The Orangutan Project, maintains that the term ‘effective extinction’ does not imply that all orangutans would go extinct in the next ten years. “Orangutans may still be found in fragmented forests in 2032, and there may still be births,” Leif says. “But if we do not stop and reverse deforestation, encouraging and supporting orangutan numbers to recover from the last fifty years of destruction, their genetic diversity from small and fragmented populations will be so compromised that they will eventually die out.”

Orangutans require lowland forests with rivers running through them for survival. The thing is those are also excellent qualities for agricultural land. The pressures from multinational corporations’ greed to plant even more unsustainable monocultures are difficult to overcome. Local communities and indigenous populations have little chance of defending their land.

Orangutans have earned the right to be saved from extinction. Apart from humans, they are the most intelligent beings on the planet. It’s critical to protect orangutans, their forests, and their rivers not only for the species, but also for all life on Earth. There are still forests in Sumatra and Borneo today, but they’re constantly threatened and being destroyed at an unimaginable rate.