“We’re trying to get these countries to think about the long-term and biodiversity values that they have, in addition to generating power and revenue,” says the organization’s chief conservation officer Russ Mittermeier. But the proposed dam will compromise this victory. “The original environmental impact assessment did not take into account best practice guidelines,” Byler says, noting that the dam will displace human populations as well as chimpanzees.īyler notes that the 2018 creation of the Moyen-Bafing National Park was a tremendous success for conservation of western chimpanzees in Guinea. “The building of the dam is probably going to jeopardize the lives of up to 1,500 chimpanzees,” says Dirck Byler, great ape conservation director at Global Wildlife Conservation, a United States-based nonprofit coordinating efforts to influence the decisionmakers. In an attempt to address the potential impacts of the Koukoutamba project on the surrounding population in Guinea, one of the poorest countries on the African continent, conservationists are conducting high-level conversations with the Chinese government, as well as national and regional bodies in Guinea, and the World Bank, which funded the dam’s feasibility study. The hydroelectricity generated by the dam would likely contribute to development of the region’s bauxite industry, as well as exported and sold to neighboring countries local communities are not expected to benefit.
The project would destroy a portion of the habitat of around 1,500 chimpanzees who live in the region’s Moyen-Bafing National Park, along with the homes of thousands of human inhabitants, and vast tracts of forest home to many other species. One such infrastructure project expected to have a large-scale impact on local communities-and the chimpanzee population-is the proposed Koukoutamba hydroelectric dam in the Fouta Djallon highland region of central Guinea.Įnvironmentalists have raised an alarm over the project, to be developed by Chinese-owned hydropower company Sinohydro, for which a commercial contract was signed in February 2019 with backing from the Bank of China. “Some 60 percent of all chimpanzees live less than 10 kilometers from human infrastructure development, and for them there’s a lot of pressure,” says Estelle Raballand, the sanctuary’s founder and the president of Project Primate, a U.S.-based nonprofit supporting the Center in Guinea, another site in Côte d’Ivoire and other great apes in captivity around the world. But only 17 percent of that total live in state-managed protected areas, such as national parks. More than two-thirds of West Africa’s 53,000 western chimpanzees ( Pan troglogytes verus) live in Guinea, according to new research published in May 2019. Guinea’s bauxite reserves are concentrated in the northwest, where its extraction overlaps with the range of the critically endangered western chimpanzee. Guinea is Africa’s top bauxite producer and the biggest exporter of the ore to China, the world’s largest producer of aluminum.
Many other of the sanctuary’s residents have also been rescued after being poached, trafficked, or otherwise pushed out of their forest homes by infrastructure development or resource extraction, such as mining of bauxite, a key material in the production of aluminum. He shares his days with three other chimps, Tita, Nana, and Oumo. “When Simon arrived, he was sad, like a lost baby,” says the center’s executive director Christelle Colin, noting that a year since his arrival, and after a period in quarantine, his vitality is restored: “He’s happier and healthier-we often hear him laughing instead of sleeping.”Īt the sanctuary, Simon, now two years old, lives among about 60 other western chimpanzees in an environment as close to their natural forest habitat as possible. His mother and other family members were likely killed for bushmeat, and he fell prey to poachers who intended to traffick him as a pet. Staff at the center speculate that-as is often the case with orphaned chimps arriving at the sanctuary traumatized-Simon and his family were displaced by mining activities in Guinea’s northwest.
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