The orangutan will become extinct if no action is taken to protect its jungle habitat in the next two decades, a Malaysian conservationist has warned.

There are some 60,000 orangutan still living in the wild in Malaysia and Indonesia but deforestation and the expansion of palm plantations have taken a heavy toll, the Star newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing Tsubouchi Toshinori from the Borneo Conservation Trust.

The orangutan habitat is fragmented and isolated by plantations, which makes them unable to migrate and find mates to produce babies, Tsubouchi said.

He noted that although studies predicted that the orangutan would disappear within 50 years if their habitat continued to vanish, action needed to be taken within the next two decades to stall that process.

Environmentalists are calling for the creation of wildlife "corridors" in Malaysia to link the scraps of jungle where the orangutan have become trapped by decades of encroachment by loggers and oil palm companies.

Some 80 percent of the world's orangutan live in Borneo, which is split between Malaysia and Indonesia, and the rest are found in Indonesia's Sumatra province.