from: news.independant.co.uk

At least 1,000 orang-utans have been killed in fierce forest fires in Indonesia, hastening the species' headlong rush to extinction within the next decade.

The fires, the worst in a decade and which reached their peak last month, sent a thick pall of smoke across the region, closing airports and forcing drivers to use headlights at noon. Conservationists believe that many were deliberately lit to make room for plantations to grow palm oil - much of it, ironically, to meet the world's growing demand for environmentally friendly fuel.

Their greatest victim is the orang-utan - Asia's only great ape - which is so endangered that many experts believe that it will become extinct in the wild over the next 10 years. Some 50,000 of them, at most, still survive, and about 5,000 are thought to perish every year as the rainforests on which they depend are felled.

Originally some 300,000 of the apes - championed by Sadie Frost in the ITV series Extinct, which ended last night - lived throughout South-east Asia. But now they survive only in isolated pockets on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. In the past 20 years, 80 per cent of their habitat has been destroyed - and only about 2 per cent of what remains is legally protected in reserves.

"Orang-utans are in catastrophic decline and everything that is being done to protect them is not up to the challenge," said Ian Redmond, chairman of the Ape Alliance, an international coalition of conservation bodies and an adviser to the United Nations Environment Programme. "It is all looking pretty bleak."

The International Fund for Animal Welfare predicts that they will be extinct within 10 years. Other estimates vary either side of that figure. WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) puts it at 20 years, Friends of the Earth at 12, and the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation at just four.