Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program - Yayasan Palung

10/09/2026

Updates:
On Friday, September 25th, the skies opened up and rain fell for the first time in 3 months at our research station. It was an incredible event, one that brought immense joy, relief, and many, many happy tears.

If any lessons were learned from earlier severe El Niño years (2015, 1997), it is that a brief rainy interlude is followed by more powerful fires. So while our teams on so many fronts have experienced the most welcome of respites, we remain vigilant, patrolling, preparing, and planning. Already the national park has not seen rain for 11 days. Fires continue to smolder in the peatland areas. The thick, smokey haze remains. We are assessing remaining forest patches, surveying burned areas, locating stranded wildlife, and continuing to support communities in their quests for clean water.

Photo 1. Rangkong Research Station Coordinator, Syai, basking in the feel of rain for the first time in months.
Photo 2. Our staff and LPHD assess the burned Village Forests and find the remnants of the patrol camp in Penjalaan
Photo 3. Our thermal drone detects new hotspots in recent days following a short respite from fire after a brief rainy spell.

Your support has been incredible so far, and we continue to need it.

DONATE at https://www.savewildorangutans.org/emergency-fire-fighting-fund/



Thank you to the many individuals and organizations that have supported our efforts so far!

10/08/2026

New coverage by National Geographic of the ongoing fire crisis on Borneo.

Read it here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orangutan-wildfires

09/29/2026

The IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group’s Section on Great Apes has published a statement calling for urgent action on the fires across Kalimantan.

Recent rainfall in our region has brought some much needed respite for our teams on the ground. But peat fires are still smouldering, and the emergency is far from over. The statement calls for support to contain the fires, protect frontline responders, affected communities and wildlife, and invest in the work needed to reduce the risk of this happening again.

Please read and share the full statement.

https://www.iucngreatapes.org/fires-indonesia

09/20/2026

Robi Kasianus, our Village Forest Coordiantor, explains the ongoing fire situation.

DONATE at https://www.savewildorangutans.org/emergency-fire-fighting-fund/

09/20/2026

The fires continue outside the national park. Village Forests continue to burn throughout Kayong Utara and Ketapang regencies.

This is Lubuk Batu Village Forest. Susanto, our Animal Protection Field Officer, went to check how the village forest management board was coping with the fire and took this photo. This is a transect marker, part of the system we helped the community set up to monitor biodiversity and orangutan density in their forest, and it is about to burn. We know from this year's survey that this village forest has tons of orangutans, and we do not yet know what has become of those animals. Half of the Lubuk Batu Village Forest has already burned, and we hope the orangutans escaped into other areas, but time will tell.

Help us to support these communities with equipment, PPE, water pumps, hoses, and firefighters.
DONATE at https://www.savewildorangutans.org/emergency-fire-fighting-fund/

09/18/2026

Hi all - an update on the fire situation - our team has prevented the fire from moving closer to our Rangkong Research Station and extinguished those immediate fires. They are still fighting fires on the access road to the village, keeping that open. The larger fire is now moving up further into the primary forest and today we successfully created a fire break to contain further fire advance in that direction. However, we detected a new fire with our thermal drone and so will move into that area tomorrow to try to prevent it's spread. Thank you all so much for your support and donations. If you would like to contribute to our efforts, here is the link https://www.savewildorangutans.org/emergency-fire.../ . Today the Boston University on-line magazine "The Brink" published this article on the fires at our site: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2026/indonesian-borneo-wildfires-endanger-orangutans-and-research-station-dedicated-to-their-conservation/ I am so proud of our team and what they have accomplished. Their amazing dedication and grueling effort to preserve the forest and our research stations are truly extraordinary. It fills us with hope.

Indonesian wildfires threaten orangutans in Gunung Palung National Park—and a Boston University research station dedicated to studying them.

09/16/2026

Sharing a success in hopes it's useful to others fighting these fires around Kalimantan:

As fires advanced inside the national park, our team faced a hard problem: protect the Rangkong research camp itself, while still fighting fire elsewhere. So they built a solution on the spot, using whatever materials they had on hand. The fire hose sprinkler perimeter they created has held the fire back from camp for days now.

Watch the video to see how they built it, and how well it's held up as a wet firebreak.

And thanks to the entire field research team, that is working day and night, exhausted, and still coming up with impactful solutions.

09/15/2026

Orangutans are fleeing the fires inside Gunung Palung National Park and everywhere else in West Kalimantan.

Critically endangered Bornean orangutans flee forests as staff at Cabang Panti work round the clock to stave off blaze

09/14/2026

What is happening to the orangutans and other forest animals during these horrific fires that are impacting every bit of forest in West Kalimantan?

For weeks when the fires began in the village forests, we saw no orangutans. We hoped that they all safely made their way out via a corridor to the north. Then, over the last two weeks some started to appear - tired and scared, individuals alone and mothers with clinging babies have been moving into community gardens in the villages. With no safe forest available in the immediate vicinity, we coordinate with our friends at BKSDA and YIARI to rescue them. They receive medical care from the vets at and will await release into safe forest when there is any...

Other animals have been found by our teams as they assess burned forests - a few 'lucky' ones alive but needing serious medical attention, like a critically endangered pangolin. Others (deer, pythons, turtles, and other pangolins) have met horrific ends, succumbing to smoke and flames.

The remaining forests NEED our protection! We continue to do everything we can to stop these fires on many fronts throughout the region, but LARGE-SCALE intervention is NECESSARY!

These peat forests are some of the world's most important carbon sinks, and this region is a . We need major interventions in West Kalimantan NOW.

Spread the word, and if you have any connections in your network that could influence a large-scale coordinated fire response, please reach out!

DONATE here to our ongoing efforts (fire fighters, PPE, hoses, water pumps, excavators to dig for water, tarps, masks, clean water for communities...): https://www.savewildorangutans.org/emergency-fire-fighting-fund/ [LINK IN BIO}



SAFE Orangutan

09/13/2026

Water Bombing NOW!

Water Bombing SEKARANG JUGA

Raise the alarm.