Context
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The elephants of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo and Kalimantan in the Indonesian part of the island, have been classified as ‘Endangered’ on the IUCN or International Union of Conservation of Nature’s Red List.
Key Details on Borneo Elephants
- A team of IUCN and the Asian Elephant Specialist Group (AsESG) scientists and conservationists used satellite tracking to determine that Borneo elephants number about 1,000 individuals. Of these, about 400 are breeding adults.
Photo courtesy: Amirtharaj Christy Williams - A fundamental role of the IUCN Red List is to inform extinction risk at the national level, or at the level of a subpopulation of a species whose status might not be the same as the global population or other subpopulations.
- Geographic variations in extinction risk are central to assessing Green Status, a recently adopted protocol for refining key conservation interventions across a species’ range.
- The distinctiveness of the Borneo elephant in both appearance and genetics warrants its recognition as a separate subspecies, Elephas maximus borneensis.
- The Asian elephant is one of three elephant species alive today — the other two are the African savanna and forest elephants.
- With an estimated 40,000 animals surviving in the wild, spread across 13 countries of southern Asia, the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) has been classified as ‘Endangered’ by the IUCN since 1986.
About IUCN Red List
- The IUCN Red List is a barometer of the world’s biodiversity.
- It is used by governments, conservation organisations, academics and planners to inform and catalyse action for species conservation.
- Currently, over 163,000 species of animals, fungi, and plants are included on the Red List, 28 per cent of them threatened with extinction.
Source: DTE
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