Qualla: The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo

The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gido from The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. In 2019, a team of climbers in Sabah's Danum Valley scrambled up a yellow meranti tree they had named Menara, the Malay word for tower. Their tape measure read 100.8 meters, confirming it as the tallest tropical tree ever recorded. The tree had grown slowly over centuries in a lowland dipterocarp forest that stretches, in diminishing patches, across 428,438 square kilometers of Borneo. That single tree tells the story of the entire ecoregion: staggering natural achievement, measured just in time, in a landscape where the clock is running out.

Image: Gido from The Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo: A Canopy Like No Other

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. Borneo's lowland rain forests blanket roughly 57 percent of the island's land area, spanning everything below 1,000 meters of elevation across three nations: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The forests are dominated by dipterocarps, a family of hardwood trees that grow taller he...

Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo: Where Giants Still Walk

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0. The animal life matches the botanical extravagance. Bornean orangutans swing through the canopy, one of only three surviving great ape species in Asia. Below them roam Sumatran rhinoceroses, now critically endangered, and proboscis monkeys whose bulbous noses and pot bellies make...

Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE | CC BY-SA 2.0

The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo: Fire, Palm Oil, and the Shrinking Map

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Prince from Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.0. The forests have been retreating for decades. In 1982 and 1983, massive fires swept through Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island, clearing land that was subsequently planted with oil palm. The pattern repeated in 1997 and 1998, when El Nino-driven drought turned the f...

Image: Mike Prince from Bangalore, India | CC BY 2.0

The Vanishing Green Heart of Borneo: Fragments of Refuge

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabio Achilli from Milano, Italy, CC BY 2.0. What remains is scattered across a patchwork of national parks and forest reserves. Tanjung Puting in Kalimantan protects orangutan habitat along blackwater rivers. Danum Valley in Sabah preserves some of the last primary lowland forest, its canopy unbroken and its trees unmeasur...

Image: Fabio Achilli from Milano, Italy | CC BY 2.0