mother and Young sitting quietly in a tree and look at the group of people down, delight call in whispers, cell phones, binoculars and giant telephoto lenses in the height. After a while, the Orang-lurches-Utan-female with her young on the belly, from the duration of the cameras click accompanied, sent along the forest edge to the middle garden of an employee: There was a tree with fruits that are three times as large as a pineapple grows. She quickly bites off a, transports it between the teeth into the nearest high tree, and destroyed it there with relish.

The Danum Valley Conservation Center is one of the few places in the North-East of the island of Borneo, where there is still primary rain forest. A forest, therefore, has remained largely unaffected by humans – 130 million years. He is one of the oldest and most species-rich of the earth and is also home to the Orang-Utans.

Such forests have become rare in Borneo, and the forest disappearing people, such as the red apes hot on Malay. And the dramatically fast: Since 1999, their number fell to an estimated 100,000 animals, representing a decrease of at least 25 percent. This is the conclusion of a study, which was published in February, and the researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for evolutionary anthropology, the German centre for integrative biodiversity research (iDiv) in Leipzig were involved. So critical is the Situation, the downward trend stopped.

“We have lost so many animals, that we ask the types of protection strategies of the past decades now to the test: does What work? What didn’t work?“, to advise Erik Meijaard, a founder of the “Borneo Futures”, a network of 350 scientists, conservation in Borneo on sound scientific feet, asking, with the goal of industry and government. So the government is just going to create an “action plan 2018-2027” for the protection of Orang-Utans.

It rains less

One of the main causes for the decline of the great apes is of little surprise, the conversion of rain forest into agricultural land, such as cultivation of oil palms. “But palm oil alone, it is not,” says Meijaard. “On the account of palm oil, 20 per cent of the deforestation in the period from 1973 to 2017.” The rain forest is also used for rubber and cocoa plantations, the production of pulp and paper, and construction of mines struck. In 30 years, 16.8 million hectares were deforested, an area almost half the size of Germany.

fires, which have destroyed in the past few years, large areas of rain forest. “Tropical rain forest does not burn normally,” says Maria Voigt from the iDiv and the main author of the study, however, climate change is also on Borneo: It is raining less. Added to that, peat forests are drained for surface extraction. “Once dry, are highly flammable and the fire is hardly to be deleted, because it smolders underground. The Smoke and the carbon dioxide emissions are enormous,“ explained Voigt.