Sand dredging in a Borneo wildlife sanctuary is threatening the habitats of endangered pygmy elephants and a rare species of monkey, Malaysian activists said yesterday.
Sand-laden barges were once again moving up and down rivers in the Kinabatangan wildlife sanctuary in Sabah State on Borneo, despite having previously been stopped, they said.
Harjinder Kler from the Hutan environmental group, said the erosion caused by the dredging would affect about 200 pygmy elephants and a few hundred proboscis monkeys living in the sanctuary.
“It will cause more and more of their habitat to be eroded and polluted as a result of the siltation from the dredging,” Kler said.
As the Kinabatangan river feeds into the Sulu Sea, she said the silt from the dredging would also pollute the Coral Triangle — a global center of marine biodiversity spanning Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guniea, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
Most sand dredging works were halted following the creation of the Kinabatangan wildlife sanctuary in 2005, a 26,000 hectare area in the north of the state.
Sabah Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Masidi Manjun said he was surprised that new permits were issued to sand dredging companies and promised a full probe.
Masidi said he had last week urged the oil palm industry to donate land along the Kinabatangan riverbank for conservation.
“I am very disappointed that such a thing has happened as we have been talking about creating a corridor of life for the wildlife on both sides of the river and this dredging will destroy all our hard work,” he said.
Pygmy elephants on Borneo are a sub-species of the Asian elephant. The creatures have a rounded appearance and are smaller than their mainland cousins.
Authorities say there are around 1,500 to 2,000 left on Borneo.
The proboscis monkey is mainly reddish-brown, with grayish limbs and has a distinctive large protruding nose, from which it takes its name.
It lives in the island’s mangrove forests, swamps and jungles but habitat loss and poaching have seen its numbers in the wild dwindle to around 1,000.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS