All three species of orangutans are critically endangered; the rarest species, the Tapanuli orangutan, is the most endangered primate on the planet. A century ago, an estimated 230,000 orangutans lived in the wild. Today, only about 115,000 remain. Take that in: in 100 years, the population has shrunk by half. And it’s getting worse over time: the majority of the decline has happened in the past forty years alone.
Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 orangutans have been killed every single year of the past four decades. If orangutans continue to die at this rate, scientists fear they could vanish entirely within 50 years.