Malaysia Info Guide
for Locals & Visitors

Kota Kinabalu: Wildlife activists have built a treetop bridge in an orangutan sanctuary to help the endangered apes find new mates and prevent inbreeding.
The 43-metre suspension bridge was completed last month at the Lower Kinabatangan Sanctuary in the east coast.

"But this is a temporary measure. In the long run, we must create forest corridors for orangutans and other animals to move about," said Nobuo Nakanishi from the Borneo Conservation Trust Japan, which helped fund the project.

Orangutans are unable to swim and thus the bridge idea to help them get across rivers in search of food.

Orangutan habitats in Malaysia and Indonesia have been decimated as their jungle habitats are cleared by logging and to make way for plantations, putting them at risk of inbreeding as they are split into smaller populations.

The 26,000-hectare (64,250 acre) Lower Kinabatangan sanctuary is divided into 10 lots among oil palm plantations and villages.

Experts say there are about 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 80 per cent of them in Indonesia and the rest in Malaysian's eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo island.

A 2007 assessment by the United Nations Environment Program warned that orangutans will be virtually eliminated in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue.

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia is more concerned with building shopping malls, skyscrapers and highways, than with ensuring that rivers are clean and forests are protected.

"We are still far away from achieving sustainable development," said Malaysian Nature Society executive director Dr Loh Chi Leong.

"However, it is not all gloom and doom as the policies are in place: the problem is in the implementation.

"Even though the environment is always mentioned, it's always the last to be implemented," he said, adding that the government's "sectorial approach" to handling issues was also a stumbling block.

"The government usually handles one issue at a time. We're still not thinking holistically."
Dr Loh stressed that policy makers understood the seriousness of green issues but this awareness did not filter down to lower officials.

World Wide Fund for Nature Malaysia (WWF) executive director Datuk Dr Dionysius Sharma said Malaysia was still "too far off" from sustainable development.

"It's sad that the global indicator for development is still on the economics such as the gross domestic product."

He said since the first Earth Day 39 years ago, the same themes were cropping up.