Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts Just Made Life Sweeter for These 6 Wild Animals

Orangutan

The orangutan lives on fertile lands near rivers in Borneo and Sumatra, areas that are typically cleared to make room for palm oil plantations. Today fewer than 60,000 orangutans survive on the Indonesian islands. Other apes—gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees—are similarly threatened in Africa, where the palm oil commodity industry is experiencing a boom.

(Photo: Daniela White/Getty Images)

Rhinoceros

The Sumatran rhino once roamed widely across Asia, from the Himalayan foothills all the way to Borneo. Today, fewer than 200 remain. The largest single population of the rhinos lives in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in Sumatra, which is losing ground to illegal planters.

(Photo: Jack Guez/Getty Images)

Borneo Pygmy Elephant

This small Dumbo look-alike needs approximately 115 square miles to roam and forage. So as palm oil plantations clear Borneo’s forests, the pachyderms lose their home. “When you chop down part of their habitat, they’re still going back there looking for resources that used to be there,” Barney Long, head of Asian species conservation at WWF-US, told National Geographic. Some people lay out poisoned fruit for elephants to discourage them from returning. Last year in a forest in Borneo’s Sabah state, 14 pygmy elephants were found dead from suspected poisoning. Only about 1,200 pygmy elephants survive in the wild.

(Photo: Tim Laman/Getty Images)

Clouded Leopard

The clouded leopard, marked by its distinctive coat, is poached for its pelt, bones, and meat. But deforestation across Southeast Asia is the largest threat to this vulnerable species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the clouded leopard’s natural habitat has been decreasing 10 percent annually since 1997.

(Photo: Bill Currie/Getty Images)

Sumatran Tiger

Even designated protected areas aren’t safe. Illegal palm oil planters have overrun 43 percent of Sumatra’s Tesso Nilo National Park, which was founded to provide a home for the critically endangered Sumatran tiger. Despite strict Indonesian laws meant to protect the tiger subspecies, its population has fallen from 1,000 in 1978 to 400 today, thanks to loss of habitat, loss of prey, and poaching.

(Photo: Justin Lo/Getty Images)

Proboscis Monkey

This distinctive-looking arboreal creature is endemic to the jungles of Borneo, where it survives on seeds, leaves, and fruits. Habitat loss forces proboscis monkeys—an endangered species—to travel long distances in search of food, which puts them at risk from jaguars and natives who consume the monkey as a delicacy.

(Photo: Nicola Paltani/Getty Images)

5 Outside-the-Box Solutions to the World’s Big Environmental Problems

Been thinking of ways to save the planet?

So have this group of designers, architects, activists, entrepreneurs, artists, and planners from around the world who have been working on solutions to some of the globe’s most vexing problems.

Their proposals—20 in all—have been named semifinalists in the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s 2014 Fuller Challenge. The contest searches for the best strategies for addressing a pressing global issue, ranging from sanitation, health, food, and poverty to water systems, conservation, and design.

The Fuller Challenge judges look for ideas that can be applied globally. The first-place winner takes home a $100,000 prize.

The award is named after the inventor and neo-futurist architect Buckminster Fuller, famous for his geodesic domes and distortion-minimizing world map—outside-the-box ideas that are the inspiration for today’s challenge.

We’ve highlighted five of the most intriguing ideas.

—Taylor Hill

Eating a doughnut became a little less tinged with guilt this week: Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts committed to frying their treats in sustainable palm oil.

Dunkin’ Brands Group, Inc., parent company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, announced on Tuesday that it will obtain 100 percent of the palm oil used in its domestic operations from sustainable sources by 2016. The next day, Krispy Kreme promised to source “a large percentage, if not all” from deforestation-free suppliers.

Though palm oil isn’t just found in doughnuts—it’s a common ingredient used in everything from ice cream to lipstick to laundry detergent—Forest Heroes, an organization that works to protect the world’s forests, sees the move as a good sign.

“The one-two punch of Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme going deforestation-free signals a rapid shift in the U.S. fast-food industry,” Deborah Lapidus, campaign director at Forest Heroes, said in a statement. “Irresponsible palm oil has been a hole, so to speak, in the environmental record of the doughnut industry.”

However, some people are saying the companies don’t go far enough.

“America might run on Dunkin’, but the company needs to address the 59 other countries in which it operates, too,” Calen May-Tobin, an analyst from the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

"It’s a good sign that Dunkin’ is willing to improve sourcing for its U.S. locations; it should adopt the same requirements globally,” he added. “The company says it’s going to consider doing so, but in the meantime, tropical forests are still getting fried.”

Cleaning up the palm oil industry is a tall order, but the efforts will be well worth it. Here, we list six endangered animals that stand to benefit.

Enter Photo Gallery