JAKARTA — A conservation task force trying to help an Indonesian mine operator minimize its impact on the Tapanuli orangutan, the world’s most threatened great ape, says it was the company’s rush to rubber-stamp the process that led to the end of the agreement in 2022. But Agincourt Resources, the operator of the Martabe gold mine in northern Sumatra, and itself an Indonesian subsidiary of U.K. conglomerate Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd., blames the falling-out on local regulations limiting data sharing with foreign entities. Jardines had in early 2022 signed an agreement with the ARRC Task Force — a unit of the Primate Specialist Group under the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority — to explore ways to mitigate the mine’s impact on Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis), a critically endangered species found only in the Batang Toru Forest, with which the Martabe concession overlaps. That agreement expired at the end of 2022, and the ARRC Task Force declined to renew it on the grounds that Agincourt’s proposals for how to carry out a survey of the apes and their habitat “would make ARRC’s involvement a tick box exercise.” In a letter at the time to explain its decision to Jardines, Genevieve Campbell of the ARRC wrote that “we failed to find a way forward which would allow the panel to conduct an independent and effective review of the project’s data on orangutans.” In recent remarks to Mongabay, Campbell confirmed that Agincourt had resisted efforts by the ARRC to review and provide…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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