Chimpanzees are seriously threatened by hunting and poaching activities, along with habitat destruction and degradation, disease risk and unsustainable bushmeat trade
Some 5-6 million years ago, Homo sapiens separated from the chimpanzees as a new species. A complex play of ecological permutations and combinations — most importantly rapid change in climate — forced us, modern humans, to branch out of our ancestral lineage.
We had been evolving for some 120,000 years in Africa. And around 80,000 years ago, our ancestors decided to move out of the continent. Humans left behind the chimpanzees who still call Africa their only habitat.
Humans and chimpanzees still share around 99 per cent of their DNA. While humans have become an invasive species that colonise the planet, chimpanzees are heading toward extinction.
This is primarily because Africa is most vulnerable to climate change impacts under all scenarios simulated. The Congo Basin, known as the world’s second green lung that absorbs 4 per cent of the global carbon emission annually, has 240-million-hectare rainforest across eight African countries and supports the livelihoods of 80 million people.
Unfortunately, every year 4 million hectares (Ha) of forests are chopped in the continent which is double the rate of the global average.
News of species extinction from Africa comes at a regular frequency. This includes the chimpanzees. There are only 150,000 to 250,000 of them in the continent.
Most of them are limited to central Africa — mainly Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Cameroon. Populations are no longer found in Gambia, Burkina Faso, Benin, or Togo.
They are heading to extinction fast. Among the rarest subspecies is the Nigeria-Cameroon Chimpanzee — less than 6,000 are left in the forests north of the Sanga River in Cameroon and in southwestern Nigeria.
It has been designated as a critically endangered species by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN). If urgent steps are not taken, scientists say it will become extinct within the next two decades.
There are many threats to their existence. In the drier parts of their habitat range such as the Mbam Djerem National Park, the Bamenda Highlands in Cameroon and Gashaka Gumti and Mambilla in Nigeria, pastoralists have encouraged forest fires to provide more grazing land for their livestock, which are subsequently being converted to farmlands.
Habitat destruction has increased noise disturbances, forcing the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees to move into areas occupied by other chimpanzee communities, where they face aggression, resulting in fatalities.
Chimpanzees are seriously threatened by hunting and poaching activities, along with habitat destruction and degradation, disease risk and unsustainable bushmeat trade.
It is somewhat of a familial tragedy, therefore, that we humans are the cause of so much difficulty for this amazing species, both in captive situations and in the wild.
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