At Rewards4Earth™ our aim is to fund the projects that make the biggest difference, the organisations that walk their talk. We fund organisations that put their money into their cause and not into fancy offices and big incomes and that is why we fund organisations like The Orangutan Project.
About The Orangutan Project
The Orangutan Project is a team of passionate wildlife experts, committed to protecting Critically Endangered orangutans. They have been working for over 20 years to save orangutans from extinction. It’s a vibrant, fast-growing and effective not-for-profit organisation that supports a variety of projects focused on protecting remaining fragmented orangutan populations including fighting deforestation and habitat loss. The projects funded by The Orangutan Project not only include direct orangutan conservation, such as orangutan rescue, rehabilitation and release programs but also forest habitat preservation and restoration, education, research and local community partnerships.
Within the next ten years, The Orangutan Project hopes to increase the number of wild orangutans under permanent protection to 8,000 to ensure all distinct populations of all subspecies of orangutan survive indefinitely. This requires them to help secure 450,000 acres of prime lowland forest and protect it with 180 Wildlife Protection Rangers.
The objectives of The Orangutan Project have many flow-on effects that both protect other Critically Endangered species, such as the Sumatran tiger, elephant and rhino, as well as indigenous and local communities.
Visit www.theorangutanproject.org to find out how you can adopt an orphaned orangutan or support their game-changing work to protect rainforests.
Orangutan Facts
Orangutans are the most intelligent creatures on the Earth after humans, and they adapt to their environmental conditions by passing on culture from generation to generation. Their extinction is an individual story of horror as they are macheted and burnt alive as agricultural pest. Almost 80% of orangutan habitat has disappeared in the last 20 years, and we are losing over 6,000 orangutans a year.
Extinction in the wild is likely in the next 10 years for Sumatran orangutans and soon after for Bornean orangutans. Both species are classified as Critically Endangered according to the International UNION FOR Conservation of Nature (www.iucn.org)
Orangutan rainforest habitats are vanishing at an unprecedented pace as a result of deforestation and clearing of the land for pulp paper and palm oil plantations, with the remaining forests degraded by drought and forest fires. Every hour 300 football fields of precious remaining forest are ploughed to the ground across South East Asia to make way for monoculture plantations including palm oil. Palm oil is used in everything from food to soap and is found in over half all packaged items on our supermarket shelves.
Poaching orangutan infants and hunting for meat also threatens the species. Mothers are often killed for their babies, which are sold on the black market as pets. Rescued infants are rehabilitated at orangutan rescue centres, if you are willing to help, you can adopt an orangutan orphan here www.theorangutanproject.org/adopt/
Source: The Orangutan Project www.theorangutanproject.org