Borneo Futures is piloting new approaches to orangutan conservation that are scalable, community-led, and sustainable in the absence of external intervention, building towards the use of Interspecies Money (https://interspecies.money/) or other new financing mechanisms. Our research has identified that traditional approaches are too time-consuming and cannot generate sufficient widescale impact to address the current rate of orangutan population decline.

Our scientists have co-produced a major new study with the IUCN Oil Crops Task Force and Sustainable Nutrition Board (https://sustainablenutrition-sb.com/) on the future of vegetable oils, ‘Exploring the Future of Vegetable Oils – Oil Crop Implications: Fats, Forests, Forecasts and Futures’. Understanding the highly interdisciplinary and nuanced nature of vegetable oil production is essential to developing sustainable systems that meet the nutrition demands of current and future generations.

We are leading and coordinating a five-year pilot study on citizen-science-based biodiversity mapping in agribusiness companies. Our current collaborator is an Indonesian company with over 1200 active citizen scientists who have, thus far, recorded over 125,000 wildlife observations. We have found that the resulting data is of high enough quality to guide conservation management. This approach could save companies significant time and money in comparison to traditional methods where small teams of conservation specialists attempt to record species data for large areas. More importantly, our method invites personal interest in conservation and makes company staff proud to play a role in biodiversity management.

We are engaged in crop modelling in West and Central Africa through a UNEP-funded project to support sustainable smallholder system development.

Decimating wild pig populations on Borneo, with serious consequences for the food security and cultural practices of rainforest communities, African Swine Fever is a little-spoken-about virus that is tearing across Southeast Asia. Borneo Futures has conducted research into the virus and, through working with an interdisciplinary group of specialists, hopes to raise the profile of this formidable illness to prevent irreversible species loss, ecosystem degradation and impacts on people (e.g., increased crocodile attacks).