The Tanintharyi region of Myanmar is home to unique and endangered species, but its forests are being cleared.
Tanintharyi’s Kawthoung district lost 14% of its primary forest between 2002 and 2020.
New satellite data show deforestation activity spiking in many parts of Kawthoung, including in some of the last known habitat of critically endangered Gurney’s pittas.
Tanintharyi, Myanmar’s portion of the spit of land that splits the Gulf of Thailand from the Andaman Sea, is still swathed in old growth rainforest home to a unique medley of animals and plants – some of which are endangered and found nowhere else on the planet. But this forest is disappearing, and satellite data show deforestation appears to be accelerating in several parts of region.
One of these areas is Kawthoung, the district that comprises Tanintharyi’s southern extremity. Here live Malay tapirs (Tapirus indicus) and lar gibbons (Hylobates lar), geckos only recently discovered by scientists and secretive Gurney’s pittas (Hydrornis gurneyi) that hover on the brink of extinction.
