On June 24th, Borneo Futures had the pleasure of opening our new office and welcoming a group of esteemed guests. 

Borneo Futures is a Brunei-based company specialising in outcome-based conservation in tropical forest landscapes. Established in 2015, we engage with projects that focus on innovative science to inform the practices and policies of wildlife conservation management.

Central to our values is employing locally – recognising the talent that Brunei has to offer, and supporting our staff to develop their skills and become future leaders of their field. We are proud to work with a highly skilled local team of Bruneian university graduates. We are committed to long-term capacity building, with a vision for Borneo Futures to be fully led by Bruneians. 

The opening of our new office marks a pivotal moment in our journey to become a larger, more influential conservation entity. A major motivation for this move was the need to expand our team, manage workload, and develop our workflow and systems. 

Brunei offers a particularly fitting base for our work, where access to nature is immediate and constant—rivers, mangroves, and forested landscapes sit alongside urban life, reinforcing the connection between people and biodiversity that underpins our citizen science approach. Our new office reflects this relationship, with views over the Brunei River and the iconic Kampung Ayer (water village), the nearby forested hills, and, on clear days, the high mountains of the heart of Borneo.

The new office also provided an ideal venue for strengthening collaboration across our growing regional team. In the days leading up to the opening, Borneo Futures hosted its annual meeting, bringing together our Brunei-based staff and project coordinators from Indonesia. The meeting provided an opportunity to review project progress, discuss challenges and opportunities, and align priorities for the coming year. 

Celebrating Our New Office Opening

We were delighted to welcome the Non-resident Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, representatives from the Malaysian, British and German diplomatic missions, academics from the University of Brunei Darussalam, representatives from the Brunei Economic Development Board, business partners, and friends of Borneo Futures to celebrate this milestone with us. The event included a ribbon-cutting ceremony, opening remarks from our directors, an office tour, presentation of our research, and a networking session, providing an opportunity to showcase our work and discuss future opportunities for collaboration.

During the event, guests had the opportunity to meet our team and learn more about our citizen science programmes, conservation initiatives, and vision for strengthening biodiversity conservation across the region. We are grateful to everyone who attended and contributed to making the occasion such a memorable success.

Science, Participation, Impact

Borneo Futures’ work is centered in citizen science. Directors Erik Meijaard and Rona Dennis have worked with this concept for over twenty years, starting with the realisation that non-experts working in the field were making hundreds of biodiversity observations every day, but with no means of reporting these sightings, they were going unnoticed. We develop standardised monitoring programmes that are scientifically robust and can be implemented by non-specialists, delivering co-benefits of long-term local capacity and large-scale feedback on species presence to a database.

Erik and Rona’s citizen science experience has now culminated in two tailored systems adapted for the private sector and for use in community contexts. The first, now being used by two major companies, and previously resulted in a successful five-year pilot with a leading Indonesian agribusiness company, engages all workers regardless of their position and background, in biodiversity monitoring. Through this, workers feel more engaged with conservation efforts, making it everyone’s shared responsibility and biodiversity something worth protecting. By embedding monitoring within organisations and communities, we enable continuous data collection that is cheaper and more efficient than one-off surveys, and provides an incentive to protect rather than exploit nature.

In community settings, our KehatiKu programme incentivises biodiversity monitoring through a payment-for-observation scheme. In the first year of KehatiKu, we collected over 200,000 wildlife observations from nine villages in the Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan.  

These programmes demonstrate the potential of citizen science to generate meaningful conservation outcomes while empowering the people who live and work alongside biodiversity. By creating practical, scalable approaches to monitoring and conservation, Borneo Futures is helping to build stronger connections between people and nature across the region.

A New Phase of Growth

The opening of our new office marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Borneo Futures. As we expand our team, strengthen regional collaborations, and continue developing innovative approaches to conservation, we remain committed to our core mission: generating practical, science-based solutions that support both people and nature.

With a growing team, strong partnerships, and an expanding portfolio of projects, we look forward to the opportunities ahead and to contributing to a more sustainable future for the forests, wildlife, and communities of Southeast Asia.