Expedition to Temburong National Park
Brunei is a tiny country located on the north coast of the island of Borneo, in Southeast Asia. It covers slightly more than 5.7000 km2 and has population of around 400000. Jet it is one of the highest developed countries in the region. It's Human Development Index is second only to Singapore. This allowed Brunei to be classified as a developed country with all the security and economic growth that this involves. It is also 5th country in the world by gross domestic product per capita and 5th richest nation in the world due to its extensive export of petroleum.
This is a good news for the tropical forest that covers more than 50% of the country's territory. In its economy Brunei mostly relies on its natural oil reserves which have been discovered in 1929 by F.F. Marriot and T.G. Cochrane. Brunei Shell Petroleum Company (former British Malayan Petroleum Company) takes care of production of oil. At the same time estimations exist that the current reserves are close to depletion and are due to exhaust in about 30 years. What is going to be the source of wealth after this happens nobody really knows. When I was asking this question to several people from the Darussalam University they only shrug their shoulders: "we don't know…".
This answer scares me a little bit because knowing that most of the economy rotates around excavation of natural oil reserves and that people got used to this easy money I'm afraid that the solution may not be easily found. It might turn out that cutting forest for growing bananas or palm oil might be the only alternative. This puts an imminent threat on the forest.
The forest is beautiful. It is the real tropical rain forest that grows there. Its scientific classification is Borneo lowland rain forest within the Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests biome of Borneo. There are more than 10000 plan species and about 380 bird species. So far there are 83 mammal species described in Brunei 1 of which is critically endangered and 7 vulnerable. It is difficult to estimate the number of insect species in the region but it is truly spectacular. While mammals are shy and elusive it is the insects that you meet if you go to the forest on your own and these encounters might be really impressive.