Saving Orangutans in West Kalimantan: Reflections on Three Wildfire Crises and Two Decades of Conservation

Just last week, nine orangutans were rescued from the wildfires in a single day, all in life-threatening condition. They were brought to YIARI’s orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centre in Ketapang, West Kalimantan, a sanctuary now bursting at the seams, at a time when there are very few safe places to release them. 

For the director of YIARI, Karmele Llano Sanchez, seeing the centre this full is a painful reminder of how quickly circumstances can change. 

Only two years ago, in 2024, not a single orangutan rescue was needed. 

That empty quarantine area was not a sign that the work was no longer necessary. It was a sign that the work was succeeding. 

Together with YIARI, we have spent years reducing the need for orangutan rescues through a holistic conservation strategy combining wildlife rehabilitation, habitat restoration, intensive land patrols and careful landscape management. 

The goal has always been bigger than rescue. 

It is about giving Bornean orangutans a future in the wild — whether they have been rescued from captivity, wildfire or conflict in and around palm oil plantations — and making sure there is a safe, healthy forest waiting for them when they are ready to return. 

Crucially, local communities are at the heart of this work. 

YIARI employs around 300 local people and works closely with communities living alongside the forest. Initiatives such as the Power of Mama, a female-led forest fire prevention and firefighting team, sit alongside sustainable livelihood projects and scholarships supporting the next generation of forest guardians. 

The aim is to make conservation part of the fabric of community life, not something imposed from outside. 

Protecting orangutan habitat in West Kalimantan 

When we first began working in West Kalimantan, the landscape was changing at an alarming pace. Forest was being cleared for palm oil plantations and other forms of agriculture, while illegal logging and land-use change were degrading the landscapes orangutans depended on. 

Twenty years of hard work began to change the picture. 

During that time, hundreds of orangutans have been returned to carefully selected habitats, across more than 300,000 hectares of protected landscape, giving them something every orangutan deserves: a second chance at life in the wild. 

In recent years, we have witnessed something extraordinary: more babies being born in the wild to rehabilitated and released orangutan mothers than orangutans needing rescue. 

That is what conservation success looks like. 

Which is why seeing the landscape devastated by fire, and the sanctuary filling up again, is so heartbreaking. But this is not the first crisis IAR and YIARI have faced together, and it will not be the last. 

Restoring Borneo’s forests after wildfire 

After the devastating fires of 2015, we supported YIARI in an ambitious reforestation programme that planted 650,000 trees to help restore the forests that had been lost. 

The land recovered. Orangutan populations began to recover with it. 

Today’s fires are a devastating setback, but they do not erase two decades of progress. They remind us instead why long-term orangutan conservation matters. 

We will continue to rescue the orangutans who need us. We will continue restoring the forests they call home. And, most importantly, we will continue working alongside the people who live closest to those forests to protect them for generations to come. 

Because conservation is not about being there only when disaster strikes. It is about building a future in which fewer orangutans need to be rescued at all. 

And when that future is threatened, we will be there, now, and for as long as the orangutans need us.