Indonesia, one of the most biodiverse nations on Earth, appears to be gearing up to renew official estimates of its remaining wildlife populations, following nearly two decades without official updates on the status of some key species.

With a new forestry minister, Raja Juli Antoni, appointed in October 2024 under President Prabowo Subianto, scientists say they hope the initiatives signal a more open and transparent approach to conservation in the country. A change in tone would be a welcome shift from the previous forestry administration, led by Siti Nurbaya Bakar, whose era was marked with data censorship and a tight grip over conservation organizations.

On Jan. 31, dozens of national park managers, heads of provincial conservation offices, NGO workers, and academics across the country joined an online meeting organized by the Ministry of Forestry’s conservation directorate-general. At the meeting, the director-general, Satyawan Pudyatmoko, urged the attendees to “work together” to initiate wildlife population surveys and conduct the latest population and habitat viability analyses (PHVA) for some iconic species. Both efforts, he said, are “the current priorities of Indonesia’s conservation.”

“Oftentimes, conservation actions that are not based in science, only common sense, are not effective and wastes of money,” said Satyawan, a conservation scientist himself, who has held his current role since 2023.

Population surveys provide the raw data used for PHVA computer modeling, which aims to assess how certain species could survive under multiple scenarios in the future. This information, in turn, is crucial in developing species conservation strategies and action plan documents, known an Indonesia as SRAK.

The Indonesian government has not released SRAK documents for critically endangered species since 2007, including orangutans, Sumatran elephants and Sumatran tigers. During this hiatus, various nonprofit organizations and local ministry offices have collected and analyzed data on wildlife populations but — for reasons that were never made public — the results were either retracted or shelved at the ministry’s orders, and SRAK documents scheduled to be published in 2017 were delayed indefinitely.

Indonesian conservationists have expressed cautious optimism that Satyawan’s statement signals a positive change.

“It is a little bit too early for us to comment,” says Sunarto, a conservation scientist at the University of Indonesia’s Institute for Sustainable Earth and Resources.

But some promising initiatives are underway.

Ongoing field surveys

Under the new administration, a number of field studies are already taking place.

Conservationists have for years called for urgent actions to protect the critically endangered Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus). According to leaked copies of the unpublished 2019 SRAK document, no more than 1,359 individuals remain, 85% of which live outside protected areas. Amid this dire situation, conservationists composed an “urgent action plan” for the subspecies, only to have it retracted by the forestry ministry in 2021. As a result, elephant conservation efforts have been scattered and uncoordinated.

But in at least one landscape, that’s set to change: a 20,000-hectare (nearly 50,000-acre) land concession in Aceh held by the president. Following a meeting with the U.K.’s King Charles last year, Prabowo pledged in December 2024 to set aside the land for elephant conservation under the management of WWF. The area, which straddles five districts in the province of Aceh, has been the site of frequent human-elephant conflict, resulting in both human and elephant fatalities. Ecologist Wishnu Sukmantoro, deputy director of Forest Wildlife Society, a conservation NGO, says no elephant survey has ever been conducted in the area, and that assessing the state of the elephant population and habitat is the first step in developing a conservation plan.

Wishnu says that this he’s been able to assist WWF Indonesia and the Aceh provincial conservation authority in conducting training on Sumatran elephant survey methods.” During a workshop organized by both organizations in January, he introduced a “distance sampling” survey methodology that he says was successful in estimating elephant populations in Riau province and Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, back in 2020.

Javan leopard

With increasing conflict with humans and rampant illegal trade, the Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas) population is believed to be rapidly decreasing. According to the most recent PHVA in 2018, 319 individuals are estimated to live in Java. The real situation might be much worse, says Haryo Wibisono, director of SINTAS, an NGO that focuses on the conservation of Indonesia’s wildcats. According to Haryo, also the lead scientist of the PHVA analysis, existing estimates are based on surveys of just a few populations. An islandwide count is urgently needed to design conservation action plan for the species, he says.

Now, nine years after the last SRAK, an islandwide survey is finally underway — the largest wildlife survey ever conducted in Indonesia, Haryo says.

On April 26, as a part of this ambitious project, he and his team at SINTAS trained staff at Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park on how to analyze camera-trap data. The data will be used to estimate the population of leopards in the park and combined with data being collected in the cat’s 21 other habitats across Java. Publication is expected in mid-2026, Haryo says.

In parallel, the School of Forestry at Gadjah Mada University will conduct a DNA analysis of collected dung samples to learn more about the species’ population structure and food preferences.

Haryo says he had difficulties securing funding, partly due to the leopard’s relatively low profile, until he gained financial and practical support from tobacco giant Djarum International. This partnership opened the door to wider support from private donors and at least 35 local NGOs across Java.

Haryo also says forestry officials have facilitated the paperwork needed to carry out surveys in national parks, making it “easy and fast” to get the necessary permits to conduct a simultaneous count in multiple sites.

Orangutans

Under former minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, conservationists learned to be cautious about reporting orangutan conservation activities to the public. Scientists faced sanctions for questioning official population estimates or speaking out against plans to build a hydropower dam in Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) habitat. The 2019-2029 SRAK document, which used 2016 orangutan population data and had been already released to the public, was also retracted on the ministry’s orders.

During this time, provincial conservation agencies, nonprofit organizations and private sector groups did their own analyses of orangutan populations in their areas, but the data were not made public.

Now, together with ongoing surveys in some orangutan populations, these analyses are coming together to form a new, countrywide population assessment. According to the Indonesian Orangutan Conservation Forum (FORINA), data collection is nearly complete. Working in partnership with conservation NGOs, local authorities in Aceh, North Sumatra and West Kalimantan provinces have already submitted population analyses. Reports from East and Central Kalimantan provinces are nearing completion.

“We predict that we [will] have collected all these data in 2025 and finalize [the PHVA] in 2026,” says Ronna Saab, FORINA’s executive director. In the meantime, Ronna says, the organization can’t release the data until an official announcement by the Ministry of Forestry which, she says, officially lead the assessment.

Scattered, outdated data

Despite some promising developments, some conservationists say the situation for population assessments remains far from ideal. They share the vision expressed by Satyawan: for Indonesia to have science-based conservation strategies and action plans. But they note that for many species, the data are unsuitable or haven’t been sufficiently analyzed to form the basis for such plans. The conservation strategy for Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch), for example, is based on a 2004 estimate, says Rahayu Oktaviani, director of the KIARA Foundation, a conservation NGO. For some understudied endangered species, like the siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus), population information is either hopelessly outdated or completely nonexistent.

During the January webinar, Satyawan acknowledged that the PHVA modeling must be based on high-quality data. “No matter how good the model is, if we have a bad data, we will only have bad results,” he said, adding the ministry will coordinate the integration of data gathered by different organizations to generate “valid and reliable” PHVAs.

While many researchers agree with Satyawan’s pro-science statement, they’re skeptical about how it will be implemented. Securing good data goes beyond collecting the scattered and outdated data already out there. It also means generating new information, which is costly, they say. “Without updated data, the PHVA analysis and the action plan results might not be right,” says Sunarto

And while expressions of openness may be a welcome change, it’s unclear whether that will be matched with material support: as part of Prabowo’s “efficiency” drive, the collective budget allocation to the forestry and environment ministries has been slashed by 30% for 2025.

Government leadership and transparency

During the International Symposium on Biodiversity Conservation and Ecotourism, held in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta this February, senior conservation scientist Jatna Supriatna of the University of Indonesia said “conservation is political.” Many Indonesian conservationists second Jatna’s statement, saying the government plays a crucial role in conservation efforts. It falls on the government translate conservation data into policy, Sunarto says. The government also has the ultimate authority to manage habitat protection, which often clashes with other interests on the ground, says Donny Gunaryadi, head of the Indonesia Elephant Conservation Forum.

Donny says the government should allocate more funds for conservation, including for population surveys, which can be expensive. Habitat and population assessments in Indonesia have generally been financed and conducted by nongovernment donors, operating in different areas. Waiting for these scattered efforts to finish has always been time-consuming. For example, it took around five years (2018-2023) to conduct an islandwide survey of the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), says Haryo, the wildcat conservationist who also heads Indonesia’s Tiger Forum. “We are now analyzing the data, which may take another one year to finish,” he says.

After that, the results will go through a sluggish bureaucratic process where politics might come into play. The unpublished 2019 SRAK documents were based on 2014-2016 surveys. In the case of the Tapanuli orangutan, data collection started in 2020 but has still not been released.

This bureaucratic process hampers species conservation, Sunarto says. While scientists are counting, they witness conflicts and habitat destruction on the ground. Indonesia needs to accelerate the process of collecting samples, analyzing data, and translating all of it into policy, Sunarto says. “We need to act fast.”

Hope for science

And perhaps the government might not need to wait for the survey completion to take bold steps in conservation, Donny says. While he agrees that population surveys must be updated for high-quality PHVA analyses, he says urgent conservation actions can and should be taken based on existing, local-scale studies. “If we know that the population trend is declining, [we must take immediate action] even without a PHVA.”

For example, he says that only 12 of the 21 known populations of wild Sumatran elephants are likely to survive into the future without intervention. The others are deemed nonviable due to factors including small size, sex imbalance and inbreeding. “This is not a good situation,” he says.

While waiting for the surveys and PHVA to finish, Donny says the Ministry of Forestry should implement what he calls “fundamental actions,” such as conflict mitigation and habitat protection. “Our director general [Satyawan] is a scientist so he truly understands the conditions,” he says.

Banner image: The conservation strategy for Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch) is based on a 2004 estimate. Image by ucumari photography via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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