Making room for elephants

'Conflict inevitable'

For the past 40 years, Bornean elephants have lost more than 60 percent of their habitat in Sabah, in northern Borneo, to logging and, later, oil palm expansion, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which listed the animal as endangered in 2024.

Lower Kinabatangan, a flood plain in eastern Sabah of around 400 square kilometers, is home to around 160 elephants.

But "only half of that is now a space left for the elephants", said Farina, a Malaysian academic who heads local conservation group Seratu Aatai, or "Solidarity" in the local Sungai language.