Bonobos, eastern and western gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans are members of the "Great Apes" primate family that includes humans. Their numbers are dwindling as humans push into their habitat and crowd them out.
Humans have accelerated the decline of the Great Apes. As Africa's population grows, the need for cultivated farmland and raw materials increases dramatically, pushing the Great Apes into ever smaller reserves and protected parks. What would the world be without wild gorillas or wild chimpanzees? It would be a lot less interesting place, that's for sure.
If the Great Apes were to go extinct, should they be sacrificed so Westerners can drive around in electric cars? That's the question that will confront mankind in the next two or three decades as the raw materials to build the batteries to power EVs will strip the landscape — and Great Ape habitat — making it unusable for man or beast.
A paper published on Wednesday in Science Advances states the need for the clean revolution in energy to include attempts to protect Africa's biodiversity.
“Companies, lenders, and nations need to recognize that it may sometimes be of greater value to leave some regions untouched to mitigate climate change and help prevent future epidemics,” said co-author Dr. Jessica Junker in a statement.
Good luck with that, guys. The fanatics pushing the climate change narrative don't care about humans. Why should they care about animals?
Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.
This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.
About 20 percent of projects seeking funding from the World Bank overlap with ape habitat, according to the study.
While some in the financial and mining sector have begun trying to track biodiversity impacts as part of a broader move toward encoding sustainability in its lending, that practice is still in its infancy — and is deeply fragmented and often ineffective.
Companies have made a meager effort to protect the apes. They've developed a system known as "offsets" to protect some ape habitats while mining other areas.
This tactic largely doesn’t work, according to a report by environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth — and in the case of great apes, the Science Advances researchers couldn’t find a single case “of a great ape offset that had been successful,” they wrote in the statement.
The Great Apes have very specific habitat requirements which exist in strips along the equator and a larger area in the rainforest. But it's likely that there were never millions of gorillas, chimpanzees, or orangutans. In a sense, they've always been endangered because they're so specialized. Only their magnificent intelligence has allowed them to survive.
“Currently, studies on other species suggest that mining harms apes through pollution, habitat loss, increased hunting pressure, and disease, but this is an incomplete picture,” says Junker, a former postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and Martin Luther University. “The lack of data sharing by mining projects hampers our scientific understanding of its true impact on great apes and their habitat.”
If there were no human beings on planet Earth, the Great Apes would be the dominant land species. But like man's hominid ancestors who ultimately couldn't compete with homo sapiens — Neanderthals and Denisovans — they will eventually disappear, a victim of their own inability to overcome and adapt.
