With its 743,330 Km2, Borneo occupies the third position among the largest islands on Earth and is larger than France. It is in Southeast Asia, south of Vietnam (about 1600 km) and the Philippines (about 1550 km) west of Papua New Guinea and north of Australia (about 3500 km). It is interesting to note that the distance that separates Borneo from Chile is about 16,000 km.

Borneo, called Kalimantan in Indonesian, is divided politically into three parts: Malaysia has 26.7%, Indonesia 72.6% and Brunei less than 1%. Borneo is inhabited by 16.4 million people. The Republic of Indonesia deserves a special comment, since in addition to possessing most of Borneo, its territory is distributed through other 17,508 islands and islets that add up to a population of more than 255 million inhabitants, making it the fourth country most populated in the world, with the largest number of Muslims on the planet. Sumatra is the largest of its islands, the sixth largest in the world, with about 50 million inhabitants. Sumatra and Borneo are the only two places on Earth where orangutans live.

The forests of Borneo, described by some as the Asian Amazon, until recently covered almost the entire island with flora and fauna among the most biodiverse in the world. But in the last 50 years the Borneo forest has lost two thirds of its trees and several habitats at the expense of the timber industry and other activities that developed with unusual speed on the island.