(SE Asia)Orangutan Habitat Could Disappear Within A Decade

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http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=3 & theme= & usrsess=1 & id=158975

 

 

 

 

Orangutan Habitat Could Disappear Within A Decade

 

Claire Soares

 

LONDON, June 12: The King of the Swingers could soon find himself with nowhere

to swing. Orangutan homes may be wiped off the face of the earth within ten

years, as illegal logging demolishes rainforests in South-East Asia 30 percent

faster than previously feared, officials from the UN Environment Programme said

yesterday. “The rate of decline of the forests is the most alarming we have seen

yet anywhere in the world,” said Mr Christian Nellemann, who helped write the UN

report, Last Stand of the Orangutan. “Suitable forest habitat may be gone in as

little as a decade.”

The shaggy orange creatures once ranged across South-East Asia, but now there

are only just over 7,000 Sumatran and 45,000 Bornean orangutans left in the

wild.

A voracious market for Indonesian timber, coupled with other forests being

cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, means that the orangutans’ natural

habitat is shrinking. “New satellite imagery reveals that illegal logging is now

entering a new critical phase with the rainforests of South-East Asia

disappearing 30 per cent faster than had previously been supposed,” the report

said. It estimates that 2.1 million hectares of Indonesian forest are being

cleared every year. Put in layman’s terms, that’s a line of several hundred

thousand trucks stretching from Paris to Bangkok, loaded with illegal timber.

~ The Independent