- The jungle homes of the great apes will all but disappear
in 30 years unless human beings slow down the rate at which they are destroying
the animals' habitats, the UN said yesterday.
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- Logging, mining, human settlement and the trade in ape
meat were wiping out gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos in Africa and the
orang-utans of Asia, according to a United Nations report launched at the
Earth Summit. UN officials called for urgent action to save mankind's closest
relatives, saying that their fate was crucial to the success of the Earth
Summit's plans to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010.
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- "The great apes will be the litmus test of whether
the world succeeds in this important goal," Klaus T'pfer, executive
director of the UN Environment Programme, said.
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- The report looked at each of the four great ape populations
and mapped out the likely impact on their habitats if development was not
slowed down. "Less than 10 per cent of the remaining habitat of the
great apes of Africa will be left relatively undisturbed by 2030 if road-building,
mining camps and other infrastructure developments continue at current
levels," the report said.
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- The future of the orangutans of South-East Asia looks
even bleaker. In 28 years there will be almost no pristine habitat left.
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- The shrinking habitat has been accompanied by a sharp
decline in great ape populations. Some estimates put the chimpanzee population
at 200,000, compared with more than two million a century ago. There are
a few thousand lowland gorillas left and only a few hundred mountain gorillas
on the volcanic slopes of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
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- Researchers say that the great apes are highly intelligent
with sophisticated social structures. Chimpanzees share 98.4 per cent of
human DNA, more than any other mammal. "They are like us in more than
their biological composition," Jane Goodall, the world's leading primatologist,
said.
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- Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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