Deforestation in the Kinabatangan

Here's some pictures of the palm oil plantations:



And a picture from the road as we drove along:




Here's a map of the whole area - it used to be primary tropical forest only a few years ago - click and drag to have a look around the area. No wonder the Orang-Utans are gradually becoming extinct. The bright areas are where the primary forest has been replaced by Oil Palm plantations - an introduced species from West Africa:



It turns out that the forest won't grow back (at least within the 30 years tested so far) - it's a climax vegetation and no-one can yet work out how to get it to regenerate so that they can have managed harvests of the wood (economically). The only thing that's changing is that as more of the forest is removed, the trees become more valuable and therefore it becomes more economical to invest in research to replace the forest rather than covering it in palm oil plantations. There's also other research into ways of converting Palm Oil into fuel so there's not a lot of hope for the wildlife unless a large enough, non fragmented area can be protected.