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UN seeks urgent help for saving vanishing apes
United Nations, Nov 27: The United Nations has sounded alarm on the dwindling number of apes and is seeking urgent help of USD 25 million to save humankind`s closest living relatives from extinction.
United Nations, Nov 27: The United Nations has sounded alarm on the dwindling number of apes and is seeking urgent help of USD 25 million to save humankind's closest living relatives from extinction.
"Twenty-five million dollars is the bare minimum we need, the equivalent of providing a dying man with bread and water," the executive director of the UN Environment
Programme (UNEP), Klaus Toepfer said at the UN-sponsored meeting.
"The clock is standing at one minute to midnight for the great apes, animals that share more than 96 percent of their DNA with humans. If we lose any great ape species we will be destroying a bridge to our own origins, and with it part of our own humanity," Toepfer said in a emotional appeal. Representatives from the 23 great ape home "range states" in Africa and South-East Asia as well as donor governments, UN agencies, NGOs and other partners of the great apes survival project (GRASP), are meeting to draw up a survival plan for the world's remaining gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.
The number of great apes has been slashed due to growing human populations encroaching on their habitat, civil wars, and above all, the destruction of forests are increasingly taking their toll. Research indicates that the western chimpanzee has already disappeared from three African countries - Benin, the Gambia and Togo.
A recent UNEP report said by 2030 less than 10 per cent of their remaining forest habitat in Africa will be left relatively undisturbed and almost no will be left in South-East Asia.
Bureau Report
"The clock is standing at one minute to midnight for the great apes, animals that share more than 96 percent of their DNA with humans. If we lose any great ape species we will be destroying a bridge to our own origins, and with it part of our own humanity," Toepfer said in a emotional appeal. Representatives from the 23 great ape home "range states" in Africa and South-East Asia as well as donor governments, UN agencies, NGOs and other partners of the great apes survival project (GRASP), are meeting to draw up a survival plan for the world's remaining gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.
The number of great apes has been slashed due to growing human populations encroaching on their habitat, civil wars, and above all, the destruction of forests are increasingly taking their toll. Research indicates that the western chimpanzee has already disappeared from three African countries - Benin, the Gambia and Togo.
A recent UNEP report said by 2030 less than 10 per cent of their remaining forest habitat in Africa will be left relatively undisturbed and almost no will be left in South-East Asia.
Bureau Report