SHAH ALAM - Camera trap surveys conducted in SD Guthrie’s plantation landscape in Sabah have recorded several threatened wildlife species, highlighting the critical role connected habitats within production landscapes can play in biodiversity conservation.
The surveys, carried out within the ecological corridors in Guthrie's Binuang plantation in eastern Sabah, logged sightings of rare and vulnerable species, including the Bornean clouded leopard, sun bear, and Sunda pangolin.
The findings are part of a baseline assessment under a joint regenerative palm oil pilot project by SD Guthrie and WWF-Malaysia.
Spanning approximately 13,000 hectares, the pilot landscape borders over 56,000 hectares of neighboring forest habitat, including the Madai Baturong and Ulu Kalumpang Forest Reserves.
According to SD Guthrie, the assessment helps identify key opportunities to strengthen ecological connectivity across the landscape. At the same time, the pilot acts as a practical testbed to evaluate how regenerative palm oil practices can support production demands with broader conservation and habitat restoration goals at scale.
Insights and lessons gathered from the Sabah initiative are expected to help inform similar efforts across palm oil-producing landscapes in Malaysia and beyond.
WWF-Malaysia Strategic Conservation Partnerships senior director Dr Henry Chan said the presence of threatened wildlife in the proposed corridor areas highlighted the importance of maintaining and restoring connected habitats.
He said the baseline assessment would help guide conservation efforts and identify where regenerative palm oil practices could have the greatest impact, particularly in addressing habitat fragmentation while maintaining agricultural production.
"This baseline assessment provides valuable evidence to guide conservation actions that can strengthen ecological linkages and support nature recovery.
"It also helps identify where regenerative palm oil approaches can deliver the greatest impact, by addressing landscape-level challenges such as habitat fragmentation while maintaining productive agricultural land," he added.
The assessment also documented orangutan nests in adjacent forest habitats, highlighting the area's conservation value.
It identified several opportunities to improve ecological connectivity, including restoring degraded habitats, enhancing riverbank vegetation corridors and addressing barriers to wildlife movement, such as electric fencing in selected areas.
Guthrie president and group chief executive officer Mohd Haris Mohd Arshad said the findings provided a basis for targeted restoration and efforts to improve wildlife movement across the landscape.
"Our 13,000-hectare pilot landscape borders more than 56,000 hectares of forest habitat. That makes the way we manage our estates important not only for palm oil production, but also for the ecological links between these forests," he said.
He said the assessment would guide practical interventions and provide a starting point for measuring their results.
"The test is whether we can strengthen biodiversity and ecosystem resilience while maintaining productive estates and build credible evidence to inform how these approaches could be applied more widely," he added.
The baseline assessment was conducted between February and September 2026 across four estates and one mill within the Binuang plantation.
It examined six areas which is productivity, human wellbeing, biodiversity, ecosystem services, climate resilience and greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage.