Brunei's Heart of Borneo Commitment — Trinational Rainforest Protection Since 2007

In February 2007, Brunei Darussalam joined Indonesia and Malaysia in signing the Heart of Borneo Declaration, committing to conserve and sustainably manage a shared 220,000 km² rainforest landscape spanning the island's central highlands — one of the largest remaining contiguous rainforest blocks in Southeast Asia. Brunei's portion of the landscape covers about 409,861 hectares (roughly 1.75% of the total Heart of Borneo area), concentrated in the Belait, Tutong and Temburong districts.
Brunei's contribution rests less on new intervention than on a long-standing conservation baseline: forest cover across the country stood at 72.1% of land area in 2020 (World Bank data), and Brunei recorded one of the lowest annual deforestation rates in Southeast Asia — around 0.5% per year over 2005-2010 — reflecting decades of light extraction pressure, since the economy has relied on offshore hydrocarbons rather than logging or plantation agriculture. The centrepiece protected area, Ulu Temburong National Park (established 1991, within the ~50,000 ha Batu Apoi Forest Reserve), safeguards largely undisturbed lowland and hill dipterocarp rainforest as part of the Heart of Borneo network.
Brunei's specific, independently verified restoration and species-monitoring data are thinner than for its HoB partners: high-profile results often cited for the initiative — such as the ~400,000 ha of FSC-certified forest and the cancelled oil-palm concession that halted logging across roughly 2,600 km² of orangutan habitat — apply to protected areas in Sabah, Malaysia, not to Brunei's portion of the landscape. Brunei's own contribution is best evidenced as a forest-retention story (avoided deforestation) rather than an active large-scale restoration programme, and Brunei-specific carbon or biodiversity monitoring figures were not found in public sources at the time of writing.

Read the full analysis: https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/borneo_forests/about_borneo_forests/