Exploring Conservation Management in an Oil-palm Concession

摘要

Tropical oil-palm plantations are considered a major threat to threatened wildlife, including the Critically Endangered Bornean Orangutan Pongo pygmaeus. We review the management intervention of one oil-palm company in Indonesian Borneo that developed a plantation in an area with a wild orangutan population. Through setting aside and effectively protecting natural forest areas, the company now protects a population of ca. 150 orangutans. Further and improved management is needed to increase the likelihood that this population can survive in the long term. This specifically requires retaining connectivity to other orangutan habitats around the plantation through landscape-level, multi-stakeholder planning and improved protection of remaining habitats. We conclude that through its oil-palm development the company has had a negative impact on the local orangutan population, although this needs to be weighed against the counterfactual of what would have happened to the forests had no oil-palm been developed. Lessons learned from this case study provide important insights into how orangutans and their habitats could be protected in the kind of multi-functional landscapes in which some 70% of all remaining orangutans occur.