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Tropical Rainforests wrap around the equator of the earth like a green belt. Tropical rainforests contain a hugely rich diversity of species of plants and animals including sun bears. Rainforests are precious resources for all of us – not just for the nations in which they are found. They provide vital ecosystem benefits for the whole world.
Rainforests around the world are being destroyed at an alarming rate. This is increasingly due to destructive logging operations and conversion of the land for farming use.
The Prince’s Rainforests Project believes that emergency funding is needed to help protect rainforests and to encourage rainforest nations to continue to develop without the need for deforestation.
Please support this project by simply signed up as a supporter of the Prince’s Rainforests Project to add your voice to the many calling for urgent action to fight climate change by addressing rainforest destruction.
http://www.rainforestsos.org/
Adding your name costs nothing, but without it, deforestation might just cost us the Earth.
The need for action is urgent. Recent research shows that it will be impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change without it.
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Posted at: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/2/20/nation/3310743&sec=nation
Friday February 20, 2009
Perhilitan rangers catch pesky sun bear
JELI: Villagers in Kampung Pasir Dusun can sleep easier now that a sun bear, which had been destroying their crops, has been captured.
Wildlife and National Park Department rangers caught the female bear using an iron cage trap recently.
Ramlan Derani, 38, said the bear had been a problem for the past three years and a lot of the crops had been damaged by the bear.
“There was nothing we could do,” he said.
Zaki Muhamad, 40, said the villagers had been complaining about the bear since last year.
“The problem will never stop as long as the forests are cleared for planting or logging activities. The animals will surely encroach into the villages,” he said.
State department director Fazli Abdulfatah said the bear had been sent to the Malacca Zoo.
As we are trying to save individual animals like sun bears, tigers, elephants and other endangered species from poachers, wildlife traders, wild meat consumers, and exotic pet keepers, there is a bigger threat for all of these wildlife species behind all of these killing that act like a big tsunami that are much more destructive: will the habitat (tropical rainforest) of all of these endangered species survive? We all should know the answer, or at least aware of the issue so that we know how to act and what to do to help these species in peril and eventually our own kind will be badly affected.On last Monday, Jan 12, world experts on tropical rainforest gathered at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History discussed their papers on the following themes as a critical review of threats to tropical biodiversity.
“Will the Rainforests Survive? New Threats and Realities in the Tropical Extinction Crisis”
Will the rampant destruction of tropical forests and climate change kill off much of Earth’s biological diversity? In recent decades some biologists have claimed that up to half of all species on earth might disappear during our lifetimes. But other scientists are now disputing this view, arguing that many species can persist in logged or altered lands and that rainforest destruction is slowing. Who is right?
The stakes are high. The battle lines have been drawn. Some of the world’s top scientists lined up to debate the tropical extinction crisis.Learn more about the fate of tropical species.
See presentations from this symposium.
See background for additional information.
You can view entire symposium online at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqeQui3d_3I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAkreq7Juos&feature=channel
Below is a report made by Jeremy Hance from Mongabay.com on the symposium:
Posted on http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0116-hance_symposium.html
Symposium tackles big question: how many species will survive our generation
Jeremy Hance
mongabay.com
January 16, 2009
An overview of the Smithsonian’s Symposium: “Will the rainforests survive? New Threats and Realities in the Tropical Extinction Crisis”
Nine scientists dusted off their crystal balls Monday at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, weighing in on the future of the world’s tropical forest. Despite the most up-to-date statistics, prognosis for the future of tropical forests varied widely.
Debate’s Background
In the last few years a schism has occurred among biologists regarding the future of the tropics. No tropical scientist denies that rainforests and the species which inhabit them face unprecedented threats; neither do they argue that some of these forested regions and species will likely not survive the next fifty years. What has sparked debate, sometimes heated, is how bad will is it really? When the dust settles, what percentage of species will survive and how much forest will remain?
For years scientists have been warning of a mass extinction that could rival the previous five mass extinctions each occurring millions of years ago, including the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. Scientists have warned that within our lifetimes 50-75 percent of the world’s species could go extinct. This prediction is largely supported by the continuing destruction of the world’s tropical forest, where the majority of Earth’s biodiversity lives. Despite decades of conservation awareness, reserve creation, and pressure on policy makers, tropical deforestation has not abated but in fact has steadily risen globally. Some predictions have shown that by 2050 only 5-10 percent of old growth forests will remain. With the loss of these forests, scientists inevitably believe that the world will lose tropical species in startling numbers. This view has been promulgated by a wide variety of prominent and widely-revered biologists, including E.O. Wilson, Norman Myers, Peter Raven, and William Laurance.
Recently however a few notable biologists have begun to push back against this prognosis. Joseph Wright and Helene C. Muller-Landau began the controversy with a series of papers and presentations that argued against the common belief of an impending mass extinction. Wright’s initial study posited that current trends in deforestation would not continue in the future.
Using data from the UN, Wright argued that rural populations in tropical areas, such as those living off subsistence farming, will in the future abandon the rural life and move to cities. This exodus from the tropics by subsistence farmers, who often employ slash-and-burn techniques in rainforest areas for short-term agriculture, would alleviate the pressure of habitat loss on tropical species. Areas that were once agricultural will become secondary forest and capable of supporting high levels of biodiversity, argues Wright, a trend already seen in much of the world as forests take the place of agricultural land that was abandoned in the 1980s and 90s.
In a 2006 paper Wright and Muller-Landau asserted that “large areas of tropical forest cover will remain in 2030 and beyond…. We believe that the area covered by tropical forest will never fall to the exceedingly low levels that are often predicted and that extinction will threaten a smaller proportion of tropical forest species than previously predicted.”
Without widespread loss of habitat there would be no mass extinction, at least not to extent warned about. Wright’s modeling predicted that instead of looking at extinction levels from 50-75 percent, we would see levels of extinction that would be closer to 20-30 percent.
Before the symposium on Monday, this is where the lines had been drawn in the sand. However, the symposium served to expand upon many of the issues impacting the debate—including changing drivers in deforestation, regrowth of tropical forests, new ideas about extinction, and climate change—and even added a few new surprising conclusions about the fate of the global rainforests.
Changes in rainforest destruction trends
At present, deforestation is not slowing down. According to Gregory Asner of the Carnegie Institution, deforestation is still the dominant pattern in tropical forests worldwide. In fact, he told the audience in Baird Auditorium, that if one looks at statistics of global forest loss decade-by-decade than not only is deforestation continuing, but it is on the rise.
At the same time some of the demographic trends predicted by Wright and Muller-Landau are occurring in certain areas. Small agricultural plots in forest are being abandoned in some countries, as people move to the cities. So, why isn’t deforestation slowing down?
“The forces driving deforestation have changed significantly,” Thomas Rudel a Human Ecology and Sociology professor at Rutgers University said. He noted that between 1965 and 1985 tropical deforestation was largely due to “assisted small cultivators”. These are usually poor local people who moved into the forest to practice agriculture or ranching. These small cultivators were “assisted” by their governments, which at the time were concerned with securing sovereignty over remote forest settlements. Incentives, such as road-building, were often promised to the poor agricultural entrepreneurs.
Even though this trend has slowed, and in some places reversed, rainforest deforestation continues due to “enterprise driven” destruction. With the globalization of trade, Rudel notes that from 1985 to today deforestation increasingly occurs for industrialized agriculture, such as soy and palm oil, and for logging to produce wood products largely exported to the West. Rudel said that the trend of deforestation had gone from slash-and-burning for subsistence farming to “blocks of deforestation augmented by consumer demand”. Therefore it has become international consumption by wealthy nations, and not local needs, which is largely driving contemporary deforestation.
Rudel argued that Wright’s theory was built on “period specific model” when rural populations did most of the deforestation and local population were more directly linked. The new drivers of deforestation, however, have changed the situation.
The importance of secondary forests
One of the arguments of the Wright and Muller-Landau theory that fared better during the symposium was that the extinction crisis may not be as bad as predicted due to the significance of secondary forests and other degraded landscapes, which may allow the preservation of certain species.
In an illuminating talk, Robin Chazdon, a professor at the University of Conneticut who has studied secondary forests for twenty five years, stated that secondary forests and other non-primary growth landscapes will prove essential to biodiversity.
“These are the areas that we need in order to conserve most of our biodiversity,” Chazdon said. She pointed to several important studies in order to prove her point that secondary forests and other degraded landscapes were not lost causes in terms of biodiversity. A study in Veracruz, Mexico found that bird biodiversity was actually greater in shade grown coffee farms than in the forest. This larger diversity was due to the shade grown coffee farms retaining a good number of bird forest species while attracting non-forest species as well. Chazdon noted that agroforestry, like shade grown coffee, can be a “mixed story but still can protect a lot of species in ecosystems and use them for agricultural products”.
In the Western Ghats of India, where cultivation has occurred for 2,000 years, arecanut agriculture retains 90 percent of the bird biodiversity of the forest. In the largely degraded and devastated Atlantic Forest of Brazil chocolate grown under the canopy provides homes for 70 percent of many species, including birds, bats, butterflies, mammals, ferns, lizards and frogs.
Chazdon added that plant species also fared well, especially in secondary forests. In a forest less than twenty years old in Costa Rica, scientists discovered 90 percent of forest tree species either already growing or as seedlings.
On the other hand she told the audience that some landscapes were simply devastating for wildlife: for example soybean fields are “devoid of biodiversity” and “astonishingly poor” biodiversity exists in palm oil plantations. Palm oil plantations have been shown to retain a paltry 15 percent of species from the lost forest.
While Chazdon illustrated the potential of secondary forest and agroforestry to provide a haven for biodiversity in a fluxuating system, Gregory Asner emphasized that regrowth in forests was still in the minority compared to the larger trend of deforestation. Currently two percent of original forest cover is in process of regrowth, according to Asner’s satellite studies. Most of the regrowth is occurring in hills or mountainous areas, leaving tropical lowland species in a less advantageous position.
More skeptical of secondary forests, Bill Laurance told the media that: “Rainforest regrowth is indeed occurring in regions but most old growth is destroyed. In biodiversity terms, this is akin to a barn door closing after the horses have escaped”.
Patterns of extinction: who will survive?
Entomologist Nigel Stork from the University of Melbourne agrees with Joseph Wright that the mass extinction crisis has been exaggerated. Stork argues that the scientists who predicted extinction rates of 50-75 percent did not take into account that certain groups of species, such as birds and mammals, are more prone to extinction than other groups like insects.
Stork pointed out that half of all species described on Earth, including plants and fungi, are insects. Half of these, or a quarter of all species, are beetles—Stork’s particular passion. “Most organisms are very small,” Stork said, arguing that this fact alone offers a buffer against the loss of half the world’s species.
Studies have shown that certain traits make a species more vulnerable to extinction, including large body size, small restricted range, low number of young, top of the food chain, high specificity to another organism, and low physiological adaptation. Many of the world’s birds and mammals fall under these categories, especially the more ‘charismatic’ animals which have become poster-children for the extinction crisis: elephants, tigers, polar bears, whales, eagles and condors.
Scientists have estimated that on average a species of mammal survives around 1-2 million years, whereas invertebrates average around 11 million years before facing extinction. Another study compared various taxons in Great Britain and found that it was seven times more likely for mammal or bird to go extinct than an insect, spider, or mollusk.
In his talk Stork highlighted another point of Wright’s theory: many of the world’s most vulnerable species have already succumbed to extinction, so any species left are perhaps more resilient than scientist’s have given them credit for. The Quaternary extinction event, which occurred between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago already killed off half of the world’s megafauna, including famous species like the woolly mammoth and the saber-tooth tiger.
Stork concluded that birds and mammals are not good indicators of extinction for other species, but that the high numbers of 50-75 percent species loss assumed that an equal threat of extinction for mammals, birds, insects, fungi, etc. So far none of these taxons have proven to be a good indicator for overall species extinction.
However, Stork also acknowledged that beetles survived the last three major extinction events largely unharmed, yet such events are still referred to as mass extinctions. Often, such extinctions greatly affect particular groups of species, rather than all groups similarly. For example, while the Crectaceous-Tertiary extinction event wiped every species of dinosaur off the earth, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and insect survived. There is also simply a lack of data on the extinction of insects.
The mass extinction underway could be similar, while insects could survive largely intact, other groups may not be so lucky. In fact, Joseph Wright stated during his talk that a mass extinction of topical montane frogs was already underway.
Climate change: the unpredictable elephant in the room
One place where the scientists at the Symposium largely agreed was the threat posed by climate change to the tropics and the inability to know how it would affect biodiversity in the region. Though Stork believed that mass extinction warnings had been exaggerated, at the end of his talk he admitted, “I think climate change will change all of that this century, tipping the scale toward mass extinction”.
Wright, the other skeptic when it came to mass extinction in the tropics, agreed: “climate change, I believe, is a much greater threat to biodiversity in the tropics than habitat destruction”.
Wright noted that currently temperatues in the tropical forests had risen 0.6 degrees Celsius, and “conservative” estimates showed that by the end of the century 75 percent of tropical forests would experience a rise of 3 degrees Celsius.
“Tropical species are much more sensitive to small increases in temperature than temperate species”, Wright said, explaining why this expected shift was so alarming. In addition, he presented data showing that tropical species would have to travel much greater distances than temperate species to find habitat within their normal range of temperatures. Wright called these two factors—greater sensitivity to temperature change and larger migrations for suitable habitat—a “double whammy” for tropical species.
By the end of the century, Wright predicted, climate change would cause rainforests to become a “novel climate”: with temperatures similar to those in deserts but still receiving the requisite rainfall for tropical forests.
“How species will respond to novel climate we don’t know,” Wright admitted.
Conclusions
Although it was never stated outright, it appeared by the end of the symposium that all of the speakers foresaw mass extinction in the future of the tropics, unless drastic actions are taken. While the extinction may not reach 50-75 percent—since insects dominate the world—it would have a devastating effect on the world’s vertebrates.
While none of the scientist disagreed that the major drivers of extinction would be climate change and habitat loss, the role each would play remained contentious. While it may seem a minor disagreement, such discussions directly affect how to deal with the crisis, i.e. should the world invest in more tropical reserves or drastic measures to ensure climate change mitigation?
Fortunately, the symposium was not without concrete ideas for going forward, in fact there were many.
Robin Chazdon argued that in order to ensure enough habitat, secondary forests and agroforestry should be supported and deserved conservation attention. Though she believed primary forest should still remain primary. Furthermore, she saw great potential in reforestation projects undertaken by humans in order to speed and aid the process along; she described such projects as buffers for biodiversity and general mitigation against climate change. She hoped reforestation projects in degraded rainforest would increase rapidly.
Thomas Rudel argued that the shift in responsibilty for deforestation from small cultivators to industrial companies allowed an opportunity for governments and conservation groups to really pursue those responsible for the damage. Such actions he stated was “not available during early period of deforestation”. He emphasized the importance of supporting international agreements, such as REDD, payment for ecosystem services, and organic and certified products.
Bill Laurence viewed reserves as the key, calling them “islands of survival”. He argued for a general enlargement of tropical reserves and more support for tropical reserves, which he sees declining in health due to human pressures such as roads, pollution, and population growth along reserve edges. Furthermore, he argued that the preservation of primary forest would greatly aid in global warming mitigation.
Joseph Wright disagreed, stating that existing reserves were largely effective, so the focus most turn solely to climate change. While he stated that wide-scale ecosystem changes due to global warming were inevitable, one way to mitigate them was through forest regeneration and regrowth, a process which sequesters carbon. For the preservation of biodiversity he argued the emphasis must be put on linking “warm hot lowland areas with cooler montane areas”, so that species would have places to take refuge as their ecosystem heats up.
By the symposium’s end, Laurance stated that he was pleased with the “surprising amount of agreement”. Despite disputes about details, it did appear that the scientists were not in opposition about the most important matters: rainforests, providing many ecosystem services, are essential for global environmental health and the preservation of biodiversity; they must be protected as much as possible against the major threats which appear to be overwhelming them. In addition, while the extinction crisis underway may not affect every group of animals, it is already affecting particularly groups far and above the normal extinction rate and the cause can be squarelhy laid at the feet of a single species, ourselves.
Christian Samper, head of the National Museum of Natural History, told the media that “by bringing together the world’s foremost authorities on different aspects of rainforest science, we hope to achieve new insights into a situation with potentially profound implications for all species, ours include.”
Although questions (and debates) remain, the symposium’s goal was achieved.
Most people tend to have a impression of Borneo, the world third largest island, as a wild place where thick forest carpeted the entire landscape, wildlife are everywhere, little human settlements, a place that simply cannot be any wilder than that.
If you really think Borneo is really such a place, then, oops, sorry! You are so wrong!
In the latest November issue of National Geographic, Mel White with the photographs from Mattias Klum, reveals the “Borneo’s Moment of Truth”. A must read article if you care about rainforest, wildlife that live in rainforest, people’s livelihood who live close to the forest, and finally to all life forms on Earth, including you and me. As Mel terms it as “The majestic forests are vanishing in smoke and sawdust, but there’s still hope for the island’s fabled biodiversity- if the palm oil rush can be slowed”
Can we slow down the palm oil rush?? We have to, because there is no other way if we want to save the wild animals and wild plants that calls Borneon rainforest “home”.
Please read this article online at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/borneo/white-text, if you have not get your own copy.
Please do not forget that you can always see Borneo with you own eyes easily from Google Earth without physically being there! 
An Interview with sun bear expert Siew Te Wong:
Habitat destruction, logging, wildlife trade drive sun bears toward extinction
Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
September 25, 2008
Industrial logging, large-scale forest conversion for oil palm plantations, and the illegal wildlife trade have left sun bears the rarest species of bear on the planet. Recognizing their dire status, Siew Te Wong, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Montana, is working in Malaysia to save the species from extinction.
Known as “Sun Bear Man” in some circles, Siew Te Wong is setting up the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre (BSBCC) in Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. The project aims to save sun bears, which have largely overlooked by conservationists, through research, education, rehabilitation, and habitat conservation.
“The primary goal of the proposed BSBCC is to promote Malayan sun bear conservation in Sabah by creating the capacity to rehabilitate and release suitable orphaned and ex-captive bears back into the wild, providing an improved long-term living environment for captive bears that cannot be released, and educating the public and raising awareness about this species,” he said in an interview with Mongabay.com. “[Sun bears] remain as one of the most neglected bear and large mammal species in Southeast Asia.” Siew Te Wong’s efforts are partially supported by the Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN), an innovative group that uses a venture capital model to protect some of the world’s most endangered species. WCN will be hosting Siew Te Wong at its upcoming Wildlife Conservation Expo in San Francisco, California on October 4th. Expo attendees will be able to meet Siew Te Wong firsthand. The event, which is open to the public and costs $25-50 per person, also features 16 other conservationists working to protect wildlife around the world.
AN INTERVIEW WITH SIEW TE WONG
Siew Te Wong: I have been working on several projects on sun bears over the past 10 years or so. These included research projects on sun bears ecology, studying the impacts of logging on sun bears, looking at the effects of fruit production and climatic patterns on sun bears, surveying the status and distribution of sun bear in Malaysia, improving living condition and helping captive sun bears, and working on the conservation of sun bears. Currently, I am setting up the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre or BSBCC, in Sabah, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. This is a long-term project that focus on four aspects, i.e., education, rehabilitation, conservation, and research, on sun bears. The primary goal of the proposed BSBCC is to promote Malayan sun bear conservation in Sabah by creating the capacity to rehabilitate and release suitable orphaned and ex-captive bears back into the wild, providing an improved long-term living environment for captive bears that cannot be released, and educating the public and raising awareness about this species. You can read more about the project at http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/
Siew Te Wong: Actually I did not choose to work on sun bear. The opportunity was given to me in 1994 when I first came to the US to pursue my undergraduate degree majoring in wildlife biology at University of Montana. Dr. Christopher Servheen, a renowned bear biologist from U of Montana, was looking for a student to study the least known bear in the world at that time – the sun bear in Malaysia. Equipped with experiences radio-tracking large mammals (I was working on radio-telemetry study of Formosan Reeve’s muntjac in Taiwan from 1992-1994) and strong interest to study wildlife, I took his offer and begun to prepare myself for the next three years to conduct the first ecological study of sun bear at the same time learn as much as possible on the conservation issues on wild and captive sun bears. In 1998, I started the 3-year field works to study the basic ecology of sun bears stationed at Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, as my Masters of Science thesis project. The study not only revealed the elusive life history and ecology of sun bear in a tropical rainforest for the first time, but also exposed more questions and challenges of sun bear survival due to the human disturbances in sun bear habitat, namely logging and other conservation issues. Because these unknown questions need to be answered for sun bears and the many conservation issues that the bears faced, I decided to continue working on sun bear upon finishing my master degree. I studied the effects of logging on sun bears and bearded pigs as the topic of my doctorate dissertation as well as tropical rainforest productivity from 2005-2008 in Sabah. During the same period of time, I also started working on sun bear conservation issues since I considered them desperate issues. I did a lot of education work and helped some very unfortunate captive sun bears as much as I could. Although sun bear is now better known than it was 10 years ago, unfortunately they remain as one of the most neglected bear and large mammal species in Southeast Asia.
If I don’t help sun bear and work on them, nobody would!
Siew Te Wong: To study this elusive sun bears in rainforest, I first have to trap them and then fit them with a VHS radio-collar. It sounds easy than actually doing it. In reality, it is very difficult to trap wild sun bears. During 6 years bear trapping in the field, I only managed to trap and to radio-collar 10 wild sun bears. Trapping bears is difficult and tracking them in the rainforest is even more challenging. I used triangulation method to locate them on a map remotely. After knowing their location on a map, I then ground-track them with a receiver, directional antenna, GPS unit, and try to get as close as possible, looking for feeding signs, scat, bedding sites, microhabitat and anything about bears that I could possibly find in the forest. From these data, I learned their basic ecology and biology like their diets and food habits, home-ranges sizes, movement and activity patterns, bedding and denning sites, arboreal behavior, and the limited and critical resources in the forest. I also documented a famine period that lasted a year in 1999-2000 where my radio-collared bears and many bearded pigs in the forest died and emaciated in the study area. The famine was caused by a prolong food shortage that related to the El-Niño Southern Oscillation/La-Nina Southern Oscillation, a fig (Ficus spp.) production failure, and logging that destroyed sun bear habitat and disrupted the migratory behavior of bearded pigs. I also learned that sun bears could live in selectively logged forest. However, there are few “critical” resources in the forest they must have in order to survive. Fruit trees like mature fig trees and oak trees that do not follow the mast fruiting cycle and fruit year round are very important and critical food resource for sun bears. I consider mature fig trees as “super key-stone species” for many wildlife in Bornean rainforest including bear, due the lack of other wild fruits in the forest during the non-fruiting period that can last for many years. The other non-food critical resources are tree cavities from fallen big trees on forest floor that either serve as day beds or den sites. Due to the high rainfall and generally wet climatic condition year round, dry and safe dens in these huge tree cavities on the forest floor are critical for female bears to successfully nurse and raise cubs.
Siew Te Wong: The biggest threat to sun bears is habitat destruction. Sun bears are “forest-dependent species” that will not survive without good and large forest. They need large contiguous forest to maintain healthy populations. Over the past few decades, many parts of Southeast Asia where sun bears are found underwent tremendous deforestation and transformation from the world demand for tropical hardwoods, development, and agriculture, especially large-scale monoculture plantations. The rapid disappearance of these forested land and suitable sun bear habitat is the major cause for the serious decline of wild sun bears to approximately 10,000 individuals! For comparison, the population of the endangered Bornean orangutans is about 41,000 animals on the island of Borneo. Beside habitat destruction, keeping sun bears as pets, poaching for its body parts for consumption, medicine (gall bladder), and souvenirs, are some other threats to the sun bears.
Siew Te Wong: As I mentioned earlier, sun bears, like many kinds of wildlife, are forest-dependent species. For the forested areas that were destroyed and converted to other land uses, it is too late for us to do anything. We simply cannot “recreate” a tropical rainforest that is the same as the original forest. Our efforts to save sun bears should prioritize the full protection of existing forest from deforestation and any kind of disturbance. Different countries in SE Asia have unique problems in land use and forest conservation issues. Here I’ll look at how the timber and palm oil industries in Malaysia and Indonesia can help the plight of sun bears. Sun bear can live well in “good” selectively logged forest. I am emphasizing “good” because selective logging has been transformed from a relatively low impact logging practice (only few commercial valuable timber stands were removed from the forest) in the past, to a highly destructive, nearly clear-cut type of practice now-a-days due to the world demand for timber products and wood processing technology that turns the “poor quality” timber into something useful. Although generally speaking the regeneration in tropical rainforest is fast due to optimum climatic condition for plant growth, forest trees are extremely difficult to recruit in this kind of “trashed” forest after undergrowth vegetation like creepers, vines, rattans, wild gingers, tall grass, etc., carpet the forest floor and remain there for decades. Thus, in order to have a win-win situation for both human hunger for timber products and bears that need their habitat, governments have to apply strict logging regulations to force timber producers to follow low impact logging guidelines. At present, if total protection of sun bear habitat is not an option and we have to harvest timber in sun bear habitat, timber certification programs from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that promote environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management is the way to help reduce degradation of sun bear habitat. In addition, delineating key forest patches as refugia from disturbance within large logging concessions can be an important way to mitigate the impacts of logging disturbance. A small number of sun bear feed on oil palm fruit in plantations adjacent to forests that still sustain bears. However, the extra feeding opportunity in plantation does not benefit sun bears since it increases their vulnerability to poaching. Due to the scale of transformation of lowland tropical rainforest into oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia – probably history’s most massive conversion over such a short period of time – sun bears have lost a tremendous area of habitat and there is no argument that palm oil industry directly impacts the survival of sun bear. I urge for no further conversion of tropical rainforest into oil palm plantation. Although the industry could take more responsible and environmental orientated measures to “relatively” mitigate their impacts (such as the implementation of “eco-friendly” palm oil production practices and joining the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) that may or maybe not help wildlife), I strongly believe that the damage cause by replacing sun bear habitat to monoculture plantation is irreversible. The other measure that the oil palm industry could do to help sun bear is to work with local wildlife authorities and plantation workers to reduce any human related mortality of sun bear to a minimum.
Siew Te Wong: Sun bear is a protected species in Malaysia. Any killing, eating and using bear parts is totally prohibited by law. There are three different laws protecting sun bear and other protected species in Malaysia: Protection of Wildlife Act 1972 in Peninsular Malaysia, Wildlife Conservation Enactment 1997 in Sabah and Wild Life Protection Ordinance 1998 in Sarawak. At the international front, Malaysia is a signatory of Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species (CITES) and a member of Asean Wildlife Enforcement Network (Asean-WEN). Thus, the law that available to protect this species is sufficient. However, the problem of sun bears being killed for all kind of purposes results from lack of enforcement on the ground. In addition, there is also a lack of educational outreach to educate people in the country that it is a felony to kill and to consume bears parts. Unlike the tiger where there are several conservation and education programs in Malaysia to reduce the consumption of tiger products, very little being done to reduce consumption of bear parts apart from the wildlife protection laws, which I’ve already said are poorly enforced. The market for bear parts from Malaysia limited to China, it also includes local demand by the Chinese community and indigenous communities in Sarawak.
Siew Te Wong: The first thing we need to understand is the fact that the sun bear is an endangered species. The number of sun bear in the wild throughout the world is much more fewer than many endangered species, like the Bornean orangutan. Many these endangered species benefit from the many NGOs, biologists, conservationists, and governments working to help them. This collaboration can be an effective way to protect threatened species as we can see with many endangered species in Asia such as tigers, rhinos, elephants, orangutans, panda, and many others. Unfortunately, none of this has happened for sun bear. Thus the first way to help sun bear is to adopt the models in use for other endangered species. We need a big team of biologists, conservationists, and NGOs as well as the full support from the public and the local government to tackle the threats and conservation issues of the sun bear. The sun bear conservation efforts are clearly far behind many endangered species. What I’ve been doing for the past many years is studying this species to understand it as much as possible. It is now time for us to move on to the next level: the conservation stage, where we work hard to conserve the species with the knowledge and resources we have in hand. The Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center will be the very first initiative and a big step toward helping sun bears in Malaysia. We hope to establish this center as a model and catalyze other countries in Southeast Asia to help conserve sun bears. At the same time, we obviously need funds to operate the various activities to be carried out by the center: educational outreach and lobbying for the protection of more sun bear habitat. We need everyone to get involved, from the local communities who live close to bear habitat to the top politicians who can provide financial, institutional, and policy support for the sun bear.
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