Chimps’ Survival Hopes Jeopardised by Climate Change

Climate change is a challenge for chimpanzees, too. New research warns that a primate subspecies – one of humanity’s closest animal relatives – could become endangered within five years

The threatened subspecies of the common chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes ellioti, and there are only 6,000 remaining individuals, surviving in two populations in Cameroon.

Field biologist Paul Sesink Clee, of Drexel University, US, and colleagues report in BMC Evolutionary Biology that they combined climate, environmental and population data to model how the chimpanzees’ preferred habitats would change with climate under a “business as usual” scenario in which the world went on burning fossil fuels.

Habitat change
Underlying such research is the larger question of how variation in habitat drives evolutionary change: why are there four subspecies of chimpanzee, and how much does geography and habitat have to do with it?

So the scientists made a chimpanzee population map, and imposed it on a map of habitats.

They found two distinct populations of the chimpanzee − one in the mountainous rainforests of western Cameroon, and one in a distinctive region of grassland, forest and woodland in central Cameroon.

Then they simulated how these habitats would change under global warming scenarios by 2020, 2050 and 2080.

Their findings were that the mountain rainforest habitat would survive, but the lowland dwellers would decline quickly under all scenarios by 2020, and could disappear almost entirely under the worst case scenario by 2080.

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