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Great Apes Doomed to Extinction for Want of Budgetary Scraps from West

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 15 September 2005
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Edito Environment Africa

Save the Last Great Apes in Our Lifetime!

Treaty offers world’s last chance to save great apes

Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
UK Independent

The agreement sets targets for slowing the loss of great apes and their forest habitats by 2010, and for securing their future in the wild by 2015

They are man’s closest cousins and they are staring into the abyss. But in one of the most important environmental treaties, hope has been offered to stop the headlong slide towards extinction of humankind’s nearest relatives, the great apes.

The agreement signed in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is on a par with the 1982 whaling moratorium and the 1997 Kyoto protocol on climate change. It offers a real chance to halt the remorseless jungle slaughter of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos [pygmy chimpanzees] and orang-utans, which on current trends is likely to kill them all off within a generation.

If it succeeds - a big if - it will be the most significant move yet to counter the greatest environmental problem facing the world after global warming, the mass extinction of living species. Increasingly, the great apes are being seen as the flagship example of species that have become endangered. Last year, the African conservationist Richard Leakey said their image should replace that of the giant panda as the international icon of threatened wildlife.

The agreement in Kinshasa between the nations where the animals occur in the wild, the "range states", and a group of rich donor countries, led by Britain, publicly recognises, for the first time at the international diplomatic level, the unique cultural, ecological and indeed economic importance of the four great ape species, which share up to 98.5 per cent of our DNA.

It commits its signatories to a comprehensive global strategy to save them, which involves setting up much new legal protection and protection in the field, and widely clamping down on the illegal hunting, logging and other practices which are destroying their habitats and their populations.

Furthermore, it sets two ambitious targets: the first of significantly slowing the loss of great apes and their forest habitats by 2010, and the second of securing the future in the wild of all species and subspecies by 2015.

These are enormous tasks. At present the gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos of Africa, and the orang-utans of Asia, are under merciless assault from deforestation, war, illegal logging and mining, the captive-animal trade, hunting (they are increasingly killed for food in some parts of Africa and sold as "bushmeat") and now from emerging diseases such as the Ebola virus.

The 23 range states which contain them, from Angola to Uganda, are among the poorest in the world, characterised by extreme poverty, violent conflict and soaring demand for the extraction of natural resources. Sixteen of them have a per-capita annual income of less than $800 (£430). Although in all of these countries the great apes are protected by law, wildlife protection and wildlife law enforcement tend in the nature of things to take a low priority.

The result is that ape numbers are tumbling almost everywhere. Ten days ago the firstWorld Atlas of The Great Apes was published in London and gave a graphic and alarming picture of rapidly shrinking ranges and increasingly isolated populations.

As few as 350,000 of all the great apes, which once numbered in their millions, may now exist in the wild, and populations of some sub-species are already down to a few hundred. Some conservationists such as the chimpanzee specialist Jane Goodall believe they may be extinct in the wild outside protected areas in the next two decades.

Certainly, if current trends continue, the specialists who compiled the Atlas believe that, over the next 25 years, 90 per cent of the gorilla range will suffer medium to high impacts from human development, as will 92 per cent of the chimpanzee range, 96 per cent of the bonobo range, and no less than 99 per cent of the orang-utan range.

The treaty signed at the weekend is the product of four years’ work by the Great Apes Survival Project (Grasp), a partnership of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), which has brought together conservation scientists, pressure groups, academia, the private sector and local communities.

Grasp has managed to convince virtually all the range states bar one ­ Malaysia ­ that saving the great apes is very much in their interests, by stressing that ape populations can bring enormous economic benefits to poor communities through eco-tourism. Ten years ago, for example, before the recent civil war in the DRC broke out, Virunga National Park, home of the famous mountain gorillas, was generating $10m a year.

The new agreement places ape conservation squarely in the context of the range states’ strategies for poverty reduction and for developing sustainable livelihoods.

Grasp has also convinced rich Western donor countries that the poorest nations in the world cannot be expected to pay entirely out of their own pockets for saving the great apes. Britain has taken the lead, providing the first substantial donation to the Grasp budget in 2002 and helping to fund the week-long meeting in Kinshasa which culminated in the agreement.

It has been signed so far by a total of 23 range states and donor countries, including Britain, and remains open for further signatures (all the African range states, and more donor nations, are expected to sign).

It marks a hugely significant moment, said Ian Redmond, the British biologist who is Grasp’s chief consultant. "The international community has belatedly recognised that the future of the great apes is the responsibility of all humanity, and not just the countries in which they live, which are among the poorest in the world," he said.

Conservationists were jubilant at the weekend at the successful signing of the accord, and in particular at the lack of dissent in the negotiations which led up to it. It led to optimism about the greatest remaining worry ­ can the desperately poor African range states deliver what they have signed up to?

"I think it’s achievable," said Jim Knight, Britain’s Environment minister, who signed the treaty on behalf of the United Kingdom at the weekend. "I wouldn’t have signed it if I didn’t think that. We’re proud of the Kinshasa agreement. It means that our closest relatives in the animal kingdom now have a chance of a future."

The agreement sets targets for slowing the loss of great apes and their forest habitats by 2010, and for securing their future in the wild by 2015 They are man’s closest cousins and they are staring into the abyss. But in one of the most important environmental treaties, hope has been offered to stop the headlong slide towards extinction of humankind’s nearest relatives, the great apes.

The agreement signed in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is on a par with the 1982 whaling moratorium and the 1997 Kyoto protocol on climate change. It offers a real chance to halt the remorseless jungle slaughter of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos [pygmy chimpanzees] and orang-utans, which on current trends is likely to kill them all off within a generation.

If it succeeds - a big if - it will be the most significant move yet to counter the greatest environmental problem facing the world after global warming, the mass extinction of living species. Increasingly, the great apes are being seen as the flagship example of species that have become endangered. Last year, the African conservationist Richard Leakey said their image should replace that of the giant panda as the international icon of threatened wildlife.

The agreement in Kinshasa between the nations where the animals occur in the wild, the "range states", and a group of rich donor countries, led by Britain, publicly recognises, for the first time at the international diplomatic level, the unique cultural, ecological and indeed economic importance of the four great ape species, which share up to 98.5 per cent of our DNA.

It commits its signatories to a comprehensive global strategy to save them, which involves setting up much new legal protection and protection in the field, and widely clamping down on the illegal hunting, logging and other practices which are destroying their habitats and their populations.

Furthermore, it sets two ambitious targets: the first of significantly slowing the loss of great apes and their forest habitats by 2010, and the second of securing the future in the wild of all species and subspecies by 2015.

These are enormous tasks. At present the gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos of Africa, and the orang-utans of Asia, are under merciless assault from deforestation, war, illegal logging and mining, the captive-animal trade, hunting (they are increasingly killed for food in some parts of Africa and sold as "bushmeat") and now from emerging diseases such as the Ebola virus.

The 23 range states which contain them, from Angola to Uganda, are among the poorest in the world, characterised by extreme poverty, violent conflict and soaring demand for the extraction of natural resources. Sixteen of them have a per-capita annual income of less than $800 (£430). Although in all of these countries the great apes are protected by law, wildlife protection and wildlife law enforcement tend in the nature of things to take a low priority.

http://www.greatapeproject.org/

Save the Last Great Apes in Our Lifetime!

Protect our nearest relatives

UK Independent

They are far closer to us than many people realise. They make and use tools; they employ plants for self-medication. In a rich and complex social life, they clearly experience a range of emotions, including joy and grief. Even more strikingly, they show the beginnings of morality, in the way that excessive harassment of a subordinate by a dominant animal will evoke expression of unease by other group members. "The great apes," said the UN treaty signed to protect them at the weekend, after much effort by conservationists, "form a unique bridge linking humans to the natural world."

Many reasons can be put forward for preserving different parts of the earth’s wildlife. There are economic reasons (human communities can benefit directly), ecological reasons (other ecosystems are dependent on particular animals or plants), even aesthetic reasons (the world would be a poorer place without nightingales and primroses). All of these reasons apply to the four species of great apes, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee from Africa, and their Asian counterpart, the orangutan; but it is surely their closeness to us in so many ways - we come from a common ancestor and share more than 98 per cent of our DNA with them - that makes the case for preserving them special, even overwhelming. They are our nearest relatives.

Save the Last Great Apes in Our Lifetime!

Great Apes Doomed to Extinction for Want of Budgetary Scraps from the West
One week of US war budget could guarantee survival of our ape relatives

Environmental Data Interactive
By Sam Bond September-2005

Great apes are doomed to extinction unless conservation efforts in the countries where they are found can be linked with programmes to address human poverty.

This is the central message of the World Atlas of Great Apes released by the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Programme (WCMP).

As well as detailed maps outlining global populations of great apes, the atlas contains valuable information on their prospects for the future, threats they face and how these might be addressed.

Launching the atlas TV presenter Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek said: "We have relatives very close to us yet we are presiding over their extinction.

"I’ve been asked whether we can justify trying to protect wildlife when there’s so much human suffering on the planet but the two are actually not exclusive." Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, said the world’s apes faced extinction from five broad directions.

Poverty in the host nations, the growing bushmeat crisis, disease, the destruction of fragile habitats and equally importantly the fragmentation of habitats into isolated pockets are all taking their toll on the dwindling ape populations.

"The findings in this atlas are speaking a very clear language," said Toepfer.

"If nothing happens there’s a very great probability the great apes will go out of this world."

He said that while prospects did not look good for the apes it was not an impossible task to save them.

But many of the 23 countries that still host native populations of apes are among the poorest in the world and it is difficult to convince someone to stop logging or using the forest as a larder when their survival depends on it. The trick would be, said Toepfer, finding a way to balance the environmental and human development strategies.

"If we can’t integrate the conservation programme with the needs of the people who live there it will be very difficult," he said.

Harvard professor Dr Mark Leighton, chair of the international Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP), presented a list of just over 100 sites with viable populations that would be the bare minimum needed to save all the sub species still living in the wild.

If conservation efforts were focused on these sites, the apes had a chance, he said but some were unlikely to survive the ravages of climate change, war and other environmental disasters.

"Some of these populations are going to go extinct despite our best efforts," he said.

"There are other viable populations we did not include on the list because they were not considered as important scientifically, but if we lose a site it might be possible to replace it with another."

In some cases, the conservation crisis could be solved with nothing more than hard cash.

Dr Ian Singleton, scientific director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, said that if he had US$20 million he could simply approach the owner of a vast palm oil plantation, and let the rainforest back in to provide habitat for the primates.

"But these are multi-million dollar estates and were still trying to do conservation with US$1,000 here and US$10,000 there," he said.

In other areas the success of conservation efforts will need even more than a boost to funds.

In parts of Africa where chimps and gorillas are slaughtered for the table efforts need to be made to build on religious and cultural taboos against eating ape meat and persuade hunters to not to target the animals, which make up just a tiny fraction of their catch.

Deforestation will always continue but conservationists must try to persuade loggers to work as sustainably as possible to give ape populations a better chance.

Eco-tourism and the income it generates might also help persuade locals that a live ape is more valuable than a dead one, but as most apes are forest-dwellers they will never be as easy to spot as the wildlife on the savannah or coral reef and will thus never have the same potential as an attraction.

While there are high hurdles to clear, conservationists are nevertheless optimistic that the apes can be saved, but only if we act now.

Next week Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, will play host to an Intergovernmental Meeting on Great Apes where conservationists hope to persuade policy makers of the importance of protecting our nearest relatives.

The outcome of the meeting could decide the fate of the planet for the apes.

http://www.lastgreatape.org/

Save the Last Great Apes in Our Lifetime!

Similarities Between Chimpanzees and Human Beings

Chimpanzees and humans differ by just over one percent of DNA, and there are striking similarities in the composition of the blood and the immune responses. In fact, biologically, chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Some have proposed including chimpanzees in the same genus as human beings to recognize these similarities, calling them Homo troglodytes.

Intelligence
The anatomy of the chimpanzee brain and central nervous system is startlingly similar to our own. It should not be surprising, then, that the chimpanzee (along with gorilla and bonobo) is capable of intellectual performances once thought unique to humans. In the wild, chimps must constantly make decisions, such as which group they should join, whether to be peaceful or aggressive, for example. They are capable of sophisticated cooperation in hunting. They use more tools for more purposes than any other creatures except ourselves. And they show the beginning of tool-making behavior.

Communication
In captivity chimpanzees can be taught human languages such as ASL (American Sign Language), learning 300 or more signs. They can master many complex skills on computers. It has been demonstrated that chimpanzees are capable of reasoned thought, abstraction, generalization, symbolic representation and a concept of self. Although it is difficult to quantify emotions, those who have worked closely with chimpanzees agree that they feel and express emotions such as sadness and happiness, fear and despair - and they know mental as well as physical pain. There are uncanny similarities in the nonverbal communication patterns of chimps and humans - kissing, embracing, patting on the back, touching hands, tickling, swaggering, shaking the first, brandishing sticks, hurling rocks. And these patterns appear in similar contexts as those in which they are seen in humans. They mean much the same.

Childhood
Chimps, like people, have a long childhood - five years of suckling and sleeping in their mothers’ nests at night. After the birth of a new baby, an older child remains emotionally dependent on its mother and continues to travel with her for the next three to four years. Bonds formed between mother and offspring and between siblings during this intense association period are likely to persist throughout life. This long childhood is as important for the chimp as for the human child. A young chimp has much to learn. And because of the chimp’s fascination with the behavior of others and ability to imitate and practice observed actions, certain patterns are passed from one generation to the next. When a mother dies her orphaned offspring may be unable to survive. He or she shows signs of clinical depression, and feeding and play activities decline. Older siblings, including males, often adopt their orphaned brothers or sisters. Occasionally individuals adopt infants not related to them - instances of true altruism.

Biological Make-Up
Chimpanzees are so like us biologically that they can catch or be infected with all known human infectious diseases (with the possible exception of cholera). This is why they are used in medical research. Gradually, researchers are beginning to admit that the similarities in behavior, intellectual performance and emotions are equally striking. This is leading to improvements in the conditions in some medical research labs. Ultimately we hope it will no longer be considered ethical to use them at all.

Spread the word
The number of humans born each day is greater than the number of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos left in the world. Many people aren’t aware that great apes are endangered - so spreading the word is critically important. Tell people that without our intervention, today’s children could come of age in a world without chimpanzees and other great apes living in the wild. But it’s not too late to make a difference.

http://www.janegoodall.org/chimp_central/

Save the Last Great Apes in Our Lifetime!

Please Help those Helping the Animals!

Forum posts

  • This is very sad. I hope the UN is able to work with the respective governments of countries where the great apes reside to help them find alternative ways to develop the country by not reducing more of the ape habitats. From what I’ve read about the UN, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be effective but one can always hope.