World Orangutan Day may fall on August 19, but protecting orangutans is not a one-day effort and it is not only about orangutans.
In the forests of Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo, protecting wildlife means supporting the Indigenous Iban communities whose lands border Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary. It means restoring degraded habitat, gathering the information communities need to make decisions, and ensuring that women are not treated as an afterthought in conservation work.
Women are essential to every part of this project—from the ecologist leading the work and the women helping shape its direction to the local leaders building community support. Their involvement is not simply a matter of representation. It expands who has access to knowledge, economic opportunities, and decisions about the future of the forest.
A landscape shared by people and wildlife
Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary is home to one of the largest orangutan populations in central Borneo. The surrounding forests also support Sunda pangolins, Bornean banded langurs, bearded pigs, Sunda clouded leopards, sun bears, hornbills, and many other species.
But wildlife does not recognize the boundaries drawn around a protected area. Animals move between the sanctuary and the forests managed by neighboring Iban longhouse communities. Community fruit gardens and other locally managed forests can provide important habitat, creating a buffer between protected areas and more heavily disturbed landscapes.
That is why Community Conservation is working with ecologist Olivia Cosby, the Ulu Engkari Iban communities, the Smithsonian Institution, and Sarawak Forestry Corporation to support an approach that benefits both people and wildlife.
The goal is not to arrive with a conservation plan and ask local people to carry it out. It is to help communities develop the knowledge, skills, and systems they need to identify their own priorities and take greater ownership of the work.
Women cannot be an afterthought
When this collaboration began, men from the longhouses had already been hired to assist with wildlife surveys and camera trapping. During an informal camera-trap demonstration, however, local women made their interest clear: they wanted to learn and take part in the same work.
That moment helped shape the project’s direction. Wildlife monitoring can provide skills, influence, and economic opportunities. If women are excluded from training, they are also excluded from those benefits and from information that may guide how community land is managed.
The communities have since developed approaches that reflect how they want to organize the work. One longhouse proposed managing restoration plots and a shared nursery through a large community team that includes women. The other proposed family teams responsible for individual plots and nurseries. These different models matter because community-led conservation should not look identical in every place. It must fit the people who will sustain it.
Women’s leadership is visible in other ways, too. During a 2024 visit, the project team met with Tuai Ruman Tinggau anak Ringin, a woman leader of one of the longhouses and a strong supporter of involving the communities in conservation. The work is also being advanced by women including Olivia, Community Conservation Executive Director Teri Allendorf, and other members of the field team.
Conservation is stronger when women can participate fully—not only in planting trees, checking equipment, or attending meetings, but also in interpreting what is happening, choosing what questions to ask, and helping decide what comes next.
Rewilding degraded rubber plantations
One priority identified through conversations with the communities is restoring degraded rubber plantation areas. The communities are removing exotic and invasive plants, including Bellucia pentamera, and growing native fruit trees in local nurseries. Those trees can provide food and other benefits for residents while improving habitat for orangutans, hornbills, and other wildlife.
Restoration is being paired with careful wildlife monitoring. Before planting began, the communities established 19 monitoring plots in degraded rubber plantations, former longhouse sites known locally as tembawai, and areas along the sanctuary boundary. Camera traps, acoustic recorders, and climate sensors allow the project to compare wildlife activity across different habitats and observe how animals respond as restored areas change.
This is an important part of building community ownership. Monitoring is not only about collecting data for outside researchers. It can help residents answer questions they have about the wildlife moving through their lands, the effects of invasive species, and whether restoration is achieving the results they want.
Watch Olivia’s visual story from the trip.
Conservation that lasts
The work in Ulu Engkari is about orangutans, but it is also about much more. It is about the hornbills heard by acoustic monitors, the native fruit trees taking root in degraded soil, and the community members learning what camera traps can reveal. It is about protecting habitat before the threats from illegal logging, poaching, invasive species, and other pressures become too great to manage.
Most of all, it is about who has the opportunity and authority to shape conservation.
When women are trained, heard, and trusted as leaders, conservation benefits from more of the community’s knowledge and talent. When communities determine their own priorities and build systems suited to their lives, conservation has a stronger chance of continuing long after any single grant, workshop, or field visit.
That is the future Community Conservation is working toward in Malaysian Borneo: local people—women and men—equipped to study, restore, manage, and protect the forests they call home.
While World Orangutan Day offers a welcome moment to celebrate one of Borneo’s most beloved species, the work of protecting orangutans and their habitat, however, belongs to every day of the year.
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