CONSERVATION INSIGHT CHIMPANZEES
OUR CLOSEST LIVING RELATIVES ARE THREATENED BY HUNTING, HABITAT LOSS AND THE PET TRADE, SAYS ANDY PLUMPTRE.
Chimpanzees only live in West and Central Africa south of the Sahara. The strongholds for the species today are in Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Cameroon and Gabon. Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania have significant populations of the eastern subspecies.
The factors impacting survival of chimpanzees vary according to where they live. In DRC, for example, where there is still a lot of intact habitat, hunting for the bushmeat trade is a major reason for population declines. Further east, in contrast, people rarely eat primate meat, but habitat loss and fragmentation are very big problems for the species.
Conservationists are trying to combat these threats to protect the eastern chimpanzee in Uganda, Rwanda and eastern DRC. In Uganda viable populations of chimpanzees occur in isolated forest blocks that have been fragmented by the spread of agriculture.
By helping farmers improve crop yields in return for protecting privately owned forest we have been conserving the connectivity between forests.
A REDD+ project has been designed for this region, which will be ready once funding is available from the UN’s REDD programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).
In eastern DRC, we protected an area about half the size of Wales in 2016 by working with local communities. The Itombwe, Ngandja and Kabobo reserves were set aside to conserve apes such as chimpanzees and Grauer’s gorillas.
We are working to reduce the level of artisanal mining in protected areas – mining for minerals such as tantalum (which is used in mobile phones and other electronic devices) has led to an explosion in hunting for bushmeat of many species in the past 20 years.
There are between 200,000 and 250,000 eastern chimpanzees, but this is partly based on assumptions of how many there are in areas where they ought to be found, but we don’t know for sure.
WE HAVE MANAGED TO PROTECT AN AREA ABOUT HALF THE SIZE OF WALES.”