Time to act on wildlife corridors, says Sabah

Ruben Sario The Star 12 Jun 10;

KOTA KINABALU: Enough talk, says the Sabah Government, which wants a time frame for the establishment of urgently-needed corridors in forests divided by plantations.

State Tourism, Culture and Environ­ment Minister Datuk Masidi Manjun said the time for talking was over.

“We need to quantify our progress in the establishment of these corridors. These should no longer be open-ended commitments,” he said when closing a two-day workshop on action plans for the conservation of the Borneo Sumatran rhinocerous, pygmy elephants and orang utan in Tuaran near here yesterday.

He said the state would also push for the re-establishment of 500m-wide tracts of forests or riparian reserves along banks of key rivers such the Kinabatangan and Segama.

Acknowledging that much of the land for forest corridors and riparian reserves were now owned by plantations, notably oil palm, Masidi said the state was counting on the cooperation of their owners to “voluntarily” make the areas available.

“We hope they are willing to hand over the land as a token contribution to ensure the perpetuity of our wildlife.

“We need to have a good balance between agriculture and environmental conservation, more so if it involves iconic species such as the orang utan and elephants,” he said, adding that state authorities would be working with the Malaysian Palm Oil Council on the matter.

Masidi said action plans for the orang utan, rhinocerous and elephants showed Sabah was heading in the right direction.

The action plans call for, among others, the urgent establishment of the forest corridors as scientific work over many years have come up with results that show that each species was endangered due to a number of reasons, which include forest fragmentation.

Currently, Sabah has 11,000 orang utan, that is 80% of Malaysia’s wild orang-utan population.

The Borneo pygmy elephant is estimated to number 2,000 and is only found in Sabah and on the border with Kalimantan.

The survival of Bornean subspecies of the Sumatran rhinocerous is the most dire with an estimated 40 left.

The workshop involving wildlife experts and representatives from the plantation and tourism sectors was organised by the Sabah Wildlife Department.