Are pangolins protected in Indonesia?

Yes. The Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) has been fully protected under Indonesian law since 1999 under Government Regulation No. 7. Hunting, capturing, possessing, transporting, trading, or exporting pangolins is illegal. Violations carry penalties of up to five years imprisonment and fines of up to 100 million Indonesian rupiah. Indonesia also banned all commercial export of Sunda pangolins at the CITES level from 2000, and all eight pangolin species have been listed on CITES Appendix I since 2017, prohibiting commercial international trade.

Why is Indonesia a major source of trafficked pangolins?

Indonesia's vast archipelago of over 17,000 islands creates a complex law enforcement environment with thousands of kilometres of poorly monitored coastline. The country has significant remaining Sunda pangolin habitat across Sumatra, Kalimantan (Borneo), Java, and Sulawesi, making wild populations accessible to poachers. Proximity to major transit hubs — particularly Malaysia and Singapore — facilitates onward trafficking to Chinese and Vietnamese markets. Economic inequality in rural forest communities makes the high prices paid by traffickers (USD 150-300 per kg of scales) attractive despite legal risks. Corruption within some enforcement agencies historically reduced the deterrence effect of existing laws.

Which organisations work on pangolin conservation in Indonesia?

Key organisations active in Indonesia include TRAFFIC (which monitors pangolin trade and works with the government on enforcement capacity), WCS Indonesia (Wildlife Conservation Society), WWF Indonesia, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and Yayasan IAR Indonesia (International Animal Rescue). The IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group has several Indonesian members contributing to research and policy. The government's Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) is the primary regulatory body responsible for confiscation and prosecution of wildlife crimes, operating across all 34 provinces.

What happens to confiscated pangolins in Indonesia?

Confiscated pangolins in Indonesia are turned over to the BKSDA (Natural Resources Conservation Agency), which coordinates with wildlife rescue centres for veterinary assessment and rehabilitation. Yayasan IAR Indonesia operates a dedicated wildlife rescue facility in West Java. Animals assessed as healthy and capable of surviving in the wild are radio- or GPS-tagged and released into protected areas. Animals too stressed or injured for immediate release enter longer-term rehabilitation. Indonesia's rescue infrastructure is under-resourced relative to the volume of confiscations, and large seizures of dozens or hundreds of animals can overwhelm local centre capacity.

Is the Sunda pangolin found across all of Indonesia?

The Sunda pangolin's natural range in Indonesia includes Sumatra, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Java, Bali, and several smaller islands including Bangka, Belitung, and Batam. It is not native to Sulawesi or the eastern Indonesian islands. Habitat is predominantly lowland and hill forest, secondary growth, and forest-agriculture mosaic landscapes. The species has shown some tolerance for disturbed habitats and oil palm plantation edges, though these modified landscapes support far lower population densities than intact forest. In Java, where deforestation rates have been highest historically, wild populations are now sparse.

Country Profiles 11 June 2026 8 min read

Pangolin Conservation in Indonesia: A Stronghold Under Siege

Indonesia is home to some of the world's most extensive remaining tropical forest, and within those forests lives one of the planet's most trafficked animals: the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica). The country occupies a contradictory position in the global conservation story of this species — as both one of its most important remaining habitats and one of the world's principal sources of illegally traded pangolin scales and live animals.

Understanding how Indonesia arrived at this position, and what is being done about it, requires looking at geography, economics, law enforcement capacity, and the persistent gap between legal protection on paper and enforcement in practice.

The Sunda Pangolin in Indonesia

The Sunda pangolin is one of four Asian pangolin species and is listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Across its range — which spans Sumatra, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Java, the Malay Peninsula, and parts of mainland Southeast Asia — Indonesia contains what is arguably the largest remaining block of wild Sunda pangolin habitat. Sumatra alone, with its vast lowland and hill forest systems, supports populations that researchers believe are among the densest remaining anywhere in the species' range.

Kalimantan — the Indonesian portion of Borneo — provides similar habitat, though rapid oil palm and pulpwood expansion over the past three decades has dramatically reduced forest cover. Java, historically the most densely forested of Indonesia's major islands before European colonisation, now retains only a fraction of its original forest, and Sunda pangolin populations there are correspondingly sparse and fragmented.

The species shows considerable ecological flexibility, persisting in secondary forest, logged-over areas, and forest-agriculture mosaic landscapes at lower densities than in intact forest. This tolerance for modified habitats is both a conservation asset — it means pangolins can survive outside strict protected areas — and a liability, as it brings them into closer contact with rural communities and makes them accessible to poachers operating in agricultural zones.

Legal Protections: Strong on Paper

Indonesia's legal framework for pangolin protection is comprehensive. The Sunda pangolin has been a fully protected species under Indonesian law since 1999, under Government Regulation No. 7 on the Preservation of Wild Plants and Animals. This regulation prohibits hunting, capturing, possessing, injuring, killing, transporting, trading, and exporting pangolins. Criminal penalties include up to five years imprisonment and fines up to 100 million Indonesian rupiah (approximately USD 6,500 at current exchange rates).

In practice, prosecutions historically resulted in sentences well below the maximum, and fines were often set at levels that did not serve as meaningful deterrents to commercially motivated traffickers. A 2023 analysis of pangolin trafficking cases prosecuted in Indonesian courts found that average sentences for trafficking offences involving pangolins were under two years, and that most defendants served reduced time due to good behaviour provisions.

At the international level, Indonesia banned all commercial export of Sunda pangolins under CITES in 2000, following the species' uplisting to CITES Appendix II with a zero export quota. Since 2017, all eight pangolin species have been listed on CITES Appendix I, imposing a complete prohibition on international commercial trade. Indonesia is a signatory and is bound by these obligations.

The Trafficking Problem

Despite strong legal protections, Indonesia remains one of the world's primary sources of illegally traded pangolins. TRAFFIC's monitoring of seizure data consistently places Indonesia among the top source countries for pangolin scales and live animals, alongside China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and several African nations.

The structural reasons are not difficult to identify. Indonesia's archipelago of over 17,000 islands includes thousands of kilometres of coastline that is physically impossible to police comprehensively. The country's maritime geography, which has historically enabled legal trade, also facilitates illegal trafficking: small fishing boats moving between island ports are largely unscreened, and pangolins or their scales can be concealed in legitimate fishing or agricultural cargo.

Sumatra and Kalimantan, the two main source provinces, share maritime borders with Malaysia. The Strait of Malacca and the waters separating Indonesian Borneo from the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak are major trafficking corridors. Seizures in Malaysian ports have repeatedly traced consignments back to Indonesian collection networks, and joint Indonesia-Malaysia enforcement operations have demonstrated that trafficking rings operate fluidly across the maritime border.

Demand is the other side of the equation. Indonesian pangolins — primarily their scales — are destined for Chinese and Vietnamese markets where traditional medicine demand remains high. The price differential between what a rural poacher receives (a few dollars per kilogram) and what the scales fetch in Guangzhou or Ho Chi Minh City (several hundred dollars per kilogram) drives a trafficking economy that is difficult to disrupt at the source.

Key Seizures and Enforcement Milestones

Indonesian customs and conservation authorities have recorded some of the world's largest single pangolin seizures. In 2019, Indonesian authorities in Sumatra intercepted a consignment of over 650 kilograms of pangolin scales, arresting multiple members of an organised trafficking ring. In 2020, a joint operation between Indonesia's Directorate General of Natural Resources and Ecosystem Conservation (KSDAE) and police in West Kalimantan confiscated over 1,700 pangolin scales along with frozen pangolin carcasses.

These large seizures demonstrate the scale of the trade but also the capacity of Indonesian enforcement when coordinated operations are mounted. The challenge is that such operations are resource-intensive and cannot be sustained at the frequency necessary to fundamentally disrupt the trade. Routine enforcement at the port and market level remains inconsistent.

TRAFFIC and partner organisations have worked with the Indonesian government to strengthen wildlife crime enforcement capacity through training programs for prosecutors, judges, and customs officials. Understanding the financial scale of wildlife crime — and applying penalties that reflect its severity — has been a consistent focus.

Conservation Programs on the Ground

Field conservation work for Sunda pangolins in Indonesia is conducted by a network of government agencies and NGOs. The BKSDA (Natural Resources Conservation Agency), operating across all 34 Indonesian provinces under the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, is the primary regulatory and enforcement body. Its officers handle confiscation events, coordinate with rescue centres, and conduct habitat monitoring in protected areas.

Yayasan IAR Indonesia (the Indonesian arm of International Animal Rescue) operates one of the country's most active wildlife rescue programmes, running a dedicated facility in West Java that has received hundreds of confiscated Sunda pangolins. The organisation conducts health assessments, provides veterinary care, and releases rehabilitated animals with GPS tracking into protected forest areas.

WCS Indonesia and WWF Indonesia support habitat monitoring, anti-poaching patrols in key protected areas, and community engagement programmes in forest-fringe villages. Community-based conservation, which builds economic incentives for rural residents to report poaching rather than participate in it, is an increasingly important component of the strategy in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

Research contributions come from Indonesian universities — particularly IPB University (Institut Pertanian Bogor), which has produced important studies on Sunda pangolin ecology, diet, and habitat use in Java and Sumatra — and from international collaborations with the IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group.

Habitat Pressures: Oil Palm and Pulpwood

Deforestation is the second major threat to Indonesian pangolins after hunting. Indonesia has experienced some of the world's highest rates of tropical forest loss over the past three decades, driven primarily by oil palm and pulpwood plantation expansion. Sumatra has lost over half of its original forest cover; Kalimantan has fared similarly.

While Sunda pangolins can persist in modified landscapes at reduced densities, complete forest clearance eliminates both their habitat and the ant and termite colonies that sustain them. Plantation monocultures support far fewer insects than diverse forest and do not provide the structural complexity — fallen logs, soft soils, existing termite infrastructure — that pangolins depend on for foraging and denning.

Indonesia's moratorium on new primary forest and peatland concessions, introduced in 2011 and made permanent in 2019, provides some protection for the most ecologically valuable remaining forest. But secondary and logged-over forest, where many pangolins still live, is not comprehensively covered, and enforcement of existing forest regulations varies widely by province and political context.

The Path Forward

Conservation organisations working in Indonesia consistently identify two priorities above all others: demand reduction in consumer markets and strengthening the domestic legal deterrent. Without reducing the economic incentive driving trafficking — the high price of scales in Chinese and Vietnamese markets — enforcement improvements at the source can only contain rather than eliminate the trade.

On the domestic front, Indonesia has strengthened its wildlife crime legislation in recent years and has shown willingness to pursue high-profile prosecutions. The challenge is converting policy commitment into consistent, trained enforcement across a country of 270 million people and 17,000 islands.

What is clear is that Indonesia's Sunda pangolin populations represent an irreplaceable part of the global conservation picture for this Critically Endangered species. If those populations can be maintained through effective enforcement, habitat protection, and community engagement, they provide the foundation for long-term species survival. If the current rate of illegal extraction continues unchecked, Indonesia risks losing not just a species but the ecological services — insect population regulation, soil aeration, nutrient cycling — that pangolins provide across some of Southeast Asia's most biodiverse landscapes.