Sundaland Rainforest Nature Nonprofits

Sundaland, the forests of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and Sumatra, holds rainforest that is among the oldest on Earth, having escaped the ice ages more or less intact for well over a hundred million years. That antiquity shows: dipterocarp trees rising seventy metres, the largest flower in the world, and the only great apes in Asia. The orangutan is here, and the Sumatran tiger, and the Sumatran rhino, of which almost none remain.

The forest is being converted to oil palm and pulpwood at a rate that has made this one of the fastest deforestations in human history. The peat swamp forests are the worst of it, because when they are drained and burned they release carbon in quantities that turn Indonesia, in bad fire years, into one of the largest emitters on the planet and blanket the region in a choking haze.

The organizations here fight the palm oil frontier, rewet drained peat, rehabilitate orangutans and, more importantly, protect the forest they need, and press companies and governments on supply chains that end up in products sold everywhere.