The native animals of the island of Borneo like the Bornean orang-utan and the Sunda clouded leopard will have at least one third of their current habitat in 2080, a study predicts.
Thanks to hunting and logging, more than twice as many mammals as now will be at danger of extinction.
The island of Borneo is the third largest in the world and hosts three countries: Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia.
The study was led by a team of researchers at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.
The team used computer models and satellite images to predict where rainforest will be lost over the next 65 years based on current trends of climate change and logging. They also mapped the habitat of each of 81 Bornean mammals.
The results: 30-49 % of those mammals would lose at least a third of their habitat by 2080, meaning at least eight primate, 21 bat, and 15 carnivore species could be at risk of extinction by then.
Lead researcher Matthew Struebig said that if only an additional four % of the island’s land that is at a high altitude were to be turned into reserve land, the population of these species would have a much better chance of avoiding extinction.
But that depends on the cooperation of the logging industry, because they manage most of the land on the island.
Logging mostly affects the lowland forests, so the chances of getting more reserve land in higher forests is good, but special care would need to be taken to make sure species like the flying fox and otter civit would not go extinct, because they could not adapt to high altitudes.
“It is not so much that the species would be doomed, but more that their area requirements would unlikely be met in the land available for conservation,†said Struebig.
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