During a meeting between environmental organisations, scientists and government representatives, a programme was developed to protect gorillas and chimpanzees.
The populations of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, are in constant decline, threatened by poaching, habitat loss and our diseases.
According to a new report, the national parks and reserves spread across Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of Congo protect only 21 per cent of western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees. Despite the modest advances in conservation strategies achieved over recent decades having slowed their disappearance, these primates are still threatened by growing human populations, the expansion of extractive industries, intensive agriculture and the illegal trade in bushmeat, to say nothing of the poor enforcement of existing laws and the corruption that afflicts many African countries.
To reverse this trend, a number of environmental organisations, including WWF, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (Iucn) and the Wildlife Conservation Society, have presented a new ten-year conservation plan.
The programme, called the "Piano d'azione regionale per la conservazione dei gorilla di pianura occidentali e degli scimpanzé dell'Africa Centrale 2015-2025", focuses on identifying eighteen areas, covering a total of 655,800 square kilometres of forest, considered priority zones for the conservation of great apes and therefore to be protected and preserved with particular care, and towards which investments are to be directed.
These zones cover half of the geographic range in which the primates live and are home to more than three quarters of the remaining great apes. The environmental organisations are also calling for additional measures, such as improved law enforcement, more effective management of great ape habitats outside protected areas, and better national land-use planning.
The new conservation strategy represents the development of a previous action plan, launched in 2005, and was drawn up at a conference attended by conservationists, scientists and representatives of the six countries that are home to great apes.