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UN Launches Campaign to Save Last Great Apes in the Wild



 

The Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP) targets 23 areas where gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates are near extinction as a result of war, habitat destruction, and poaching for trophies, souvenirs, and meat.

Estimates show that in five to ten years, some of these primates will be extinct across most of their range. Local extinctions are happening rapidly. Each one is a loss to humanity, a loss to a local community, and a hole torn in the ecology of our planet.

While governments in countries such as Congo and Nigeria have reserved vast tracts of forest where apes and other primates live, political instability and economic constraints have made policing the large regions difficult. As a result, illegal poaching and human harvesting of the apes' food sources have made serious inroads into the apes' habitats.

In the Cross River region of Nigeria, United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) estimates that only 150 gorillas are left, making them the most critically endangered apes in the world. Other populations such as the eastern lowland gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega Park, Congo, have seen their numbers halved in recent years to between 110 and 130.

In 2001 thousands more orangutans were killed or driven from their forests by illegal loggers. Thousands more gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos have been killed for bushmeat to feed miners, loggers, or the insatiable urban markets.

Threats to great ape habitats include over-logging of the forests, encroaching agriculture, hunting, and wild fires as a result of farmland clearance.

GRASP plans to launch initiatives, which will employ local people to patrol designated areas, monitor illegal activities, and negotiate with illegal gold miners and loggers. While UNEP will be putting up U.S. $150 000 to start the GRASP campaign, officials say more than U.S. $1 million will be needed for the initiative. Organizers are also pushing for support from businesses and industry groups, especially the mobile phone, aircraft, and semi-conductor industries, which benefit from minerals such as tantalite and coltan that are mined in the forests.

More than a million wild chimpanzees flourished in Africa at the beginning of the 1900s, but at current rates of decline, they could be extinct by 2010 or 2020. Poaching, forest destruction, the bushmeat trade, and even human-borne disease are taking their toll on the animals.

Côte d'Ivoire, which has seven national parks that are home to chimpanzees, contains the largest population of chimps in West Africa. But most of them live in fragmented and dispersed populations that have limited prospect of long-term survival. UNEP recommends that wildlife corridors linking fragmented habitats
and isolated populations be created to expand sustainable habitats for chimps. Such tracts could then become magnets for tourism.

Citing the important role chimpanzees have in all traditional African mythologies as well as the genuine interest humans have in their fellow primates, UNEP officials are encouraging ecotourism development in threatened regions to counter poaching and other encroaching menaces.

A conservation action plan for each of a series of key ranges for the primates is proposed, which would include improving protection for the remaining chimpanzees, evaluating tree planting schemes to improve their habitat, training people from local communities to monitor given sections of each park, and establishing education centres where adults and children may be encouraged to participate in conservation.

Where great ape tourism has been developed, for instance, in Uganda's National Parks, they have become to local communities an important source of revenue – worth more alive than dead.

Unfortunately, too few people are aware of the role gorillas play in regenerating woodlands by dispersing seeds and pruning trees – along with elephants, they are the gardeners of the African and Southeast Asian forests.

This is the reason why conservationists led by the UNEP have launched a global effort to save primates from extinction in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

Reggie Royston. National Geographic News. 2001

 

 


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