Fires and floods, what African apes will experience in the next 30 years

The apes of Africa They are already suffering the effects of climate change, but what is coming will be worse. In the next thirty years, these animals will frequently suffer extreme events caused by global warming, such as firesheat waves or floods.

This is the main conclusion of an international study led by Razak Kiribou, from Haramaya University in Ethiopia and carried out by researchers from Nigeria, China, Germany, France, Rwanda and Ghana.

The details are published this Wednesday in the journal Plos Climate.

To better understand how climate change will affect African great apes, researchers studied the past and future climate of 363 locations in Africa and calculated temperature and precipitation at each location between 1981 and 2010.

Using two climate change scenarios, they projected the frequency with which apes would be exposed to the impacts of climate change in the near future (2021-2050) and long term (2071-2099).

They also calculated the probability of extreme events that could directly or indirectly affect the apes, such as droughts, floods, forest fires and crop failures.

The researchers found that between 2007 and 2016, almost half of the places had experienced above-average temperatures, and that eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) had endured the most extreme temperatures.

For the future, in the two projected climate scenarios, the study predicted an increase in temperatures in all the places analyzed, and warned that almost all of them would be affected by frequent forest fires and crop failures in the near future.

Even in a scenario where mitigation measures limited warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, 84% of places would be exposed to frequent heat waves and 78% to infrequent floods in the next 30 years.

In an alternative scenario in which global temperature increased by 3 °C, the number of affected places and the frequency of the phenomena would be greater.

Increase the resistance of apes

This study is the first to show that African apes are already experiencing the effects of climate change and that everything indicates that the future will be worse, with frequent extreme events.

In view of these data, the authors state that conservation action plans should aim to increase the resistance of ape populations to climate change.

“Our study indicates the urgent need to incorporate adaptation to the impacts of climate change into conservation planning for African great apes.””, he concludes.