“We sent letters to the ministry and sent staff from our team to go and speak to them, but never received any responses and they would not provide us with any information,” said Manurung. The institutions themselves did not cooperate with the study, Manurung said. The organisation said these concerns came from local communities around Ujung Kulon, as well as anonymous staff from the national park and even the MoEF in Jakarta. The Auriga report stated the group was motivated to investigate the Javan rhino population after being inundated last year with calls raising alarm over the species. Map showing illegal activities caught on camera trap. “Even the park’s authorities already consider them dead, but they cannot publish that information as it’s being suppressed by the head of the park authority and politicians in the MoEF.” “It’s best to assume they’re dead,” Manurung said of the still-missing rhinos. The analysis is at sharp odds with population estimates from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF), which has yet to respond to the Auriga report and has only announced the confirmed death of one rhino infant, Manggala, in 2019. Three of the missing were eventually found dead, but the remaining 15 have yet to be found. Of the 69 rhinos alive in 2018 – as announced by the Ujung Kulon National Park Office – the study reported that 18 had disappeared across a system of more than 220 camera traps used throughout the park in a period from 2019-2021 Last month, Auriga published the findings of a study drawing from interviews with government whistleblowers and camera trap data that estimated the rhino numbers had decreased by about 21% since 2019. They are politicising conservation through censorship,” said Timer Manurung, director of the non-governmental environmental research group Auriga Nusantara. “If it’s incompatible with the government line, it’s prohibited. The growing discrepancy is part of what some researchers have decried as part of a tightening system to control the narrative of the state’s conservation efforts. However, a Jakarta-based environmental advocacy group is now arguing the real number is likely far lower, saying the park’s own camera trap data suggests the rhinos are dying off faster than they can reproduce – in part due to the apparent return of poachers to Ujung Kulon for the first time in 30 years. The Indonesian government typically reports small annual increases for this group, announcing a population of 76 in 2021, up from 73 in 2020. With a contested global population of about 70, the Javan rhino is on the edge of extinction.īut the question of just how few remain has become a politically sensitive issue in Indonesia, where the entirety of the species lives in Ujung Kulon National Park, on the western tip of the island of Java.
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