The species, native to Borneo, especially Sabah, runs a very high risk of becoming extinct in the wild, said elephant expert Cheryl Cheah of the World Wide Fund for Nature Malaysia.

“Their classification as ‘endangered’ underscores the urgency of conservation actions such as the management of human-elephant conflict and the prevention of further habitat loss and fragmentation,” she said in a statement today.

Cheah said Bornean elephants are evolutionarily significant, being a distinct species from mainland Asian elephants, rendering them unique to the island of Borneo and part of its natural heritage.

The Bornean elephant, also known as the Borneo pygmy elephant, is a subspecies of the Asian elephant or Elephas maximus, and is distinguished by their small size, with males growing to some 2.5m in height.

The Asian elephant was declared as endangered under the IUCN Red List in 2019 while the Bornean elephant was declared as endangered in an assessment on Nov 17 and published this year.

The IUCN stated that there are 1,000 individual Bornean elephants in total, with about 400 being breeding adults.

“Around 60% of the Bornean elephants’ forest habitat has been lost in the last 40 years, primarily due to logging and the planting of commercial oil palm,” the IUCN said. Although the Malaysian and Indonesian governments have action plans for the conservation of Borneo’s elephants, they face many challenges.