Need for critical minerals threatens Africa's great apes

A total of 178,816 great apes, 34% of those left in Africa, live in areas near a mine or with plans to open one. The most affected populations are in the western and central regions of the continent, which concentrate the majority of chimpanzees and the western gorilla. Among the minerals prospected are many of the so-called critical ones, due to their essential role in the transition to the production and consumption of clean energy.

In 2020, research estimated the global area affected by land mining at 50 million km², limiting it to a radius of 50 kilometers around each mine. Most of eastern and northern Europe, the entire American Pacific belt, central, eastern and southeastern Asia and much of the Australian continent are dotted with mining installations. In Africa, the density of operational exploitations was much lower, but it is the region on the planet with the greatest number of prospecting or plans to open new mines. In more than 80% of cases these are deposits of lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, manganese... All considered critical minerals given their scarcity and their key role in various technologies, especially those related to the production and consumption of clean energy. . The African continent is home to 30% of these mining resources. The problem is that it is also in the ecoregion that conserves the greatest biodiversity, with 25% of the mammal species and, except for the orangutan, all the great apes.

What a large group of researchers has now done is to overlap the map of mining prospecting with the distribution in 17 African countries (with an area of ​​1.5 million km²) of chimpanzees, bonobos and the western gorilla, the most abundant, obtained from reports of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The results, published in the journal

Science Advances

, show how complicated it will be to accelerate the goodbye to fossil fuels without further cornering the African great apes, already decimated in the last 150 years.

More information

Chimpanzees have culture and it is in danger

3% of the total great ape population will be within 10 kilometers of a mining facility. This distance is the range in which, according to the authors, a direct impact would be felt, in the form of habitat destruction, chemical, light and noise pollution or increased risk of disease entry. But the work also catalogs and estimates other more indirect impacts, such as the fragmentation of the territory of the populations. Another of its greatest impacts lies in the development of roads and railways, which are channels for other harmful effects, such as increasing the density of humans or logging and agriculture to feed them. A work published in 2021 showed how the negative consequences of a new road for chimpanzee populations were noticeable up to 17 kilometers beyond its shoulders. In this new study, the extent of this damage has been limited to 50 kilometers around the mining facility. A third of African great apes live in that range.

Several trucks transport bauxite along a road in Guinea. In this country, 83% of its 23,000 chimpanzees live in areas of mining interest. Genevieve Campbell

Traditional and better studied threats, such as hunting, logging and agriculture, were considered the main dangers. But for the researcher at the conservation organization Re:wild and first author of the study, Jessica Junker, the impact of mining is being undervalued. And it does not stop at those ten kilometers: “Studies with other species suggest that it harms apes through pollution, habitat loss, increased hunting pressure and diseases, but this is an image incomplete,” he says. Already from the exploratory phase, the noise of drilling and detonations alters the communities. Metal contamination of water, road accidents or the high risk of exposing them to an infectious disease for which they are not trained are elements whose impact is known, although it is difficult to quantify it. “The lack of data sharing by mining projects hinders our scientific understanding of their true impact on great apes and their habitat,” adds Junker, who began this research while completing his postgraduate degree at the German Center for Integrative Research in Biodiversity (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig.

Chinese opacity

By region, West African chimpanzees have it the worst. The mining areas of five of the eight countries in the area coincide with the last refuges of these animals. The most extreme case is that of Guinea, the third country with the largest reserves of bauxite (a source of aluminum) in the world. 83% of its 23,000 chimpanzees live in areas of mining interest. In the central continent countries studied (Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea or Gabon), 29% of their great apes live in the area affected by a mine or prospecting. Meanwhile, 62% of the populations in the east of the continent (Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda), smaller, overlap their territories with the miners. “There are more mining projects in West Africa than in Central or East Africa. So, proportionally, the greatest overlap between mining areas and great apes occurs here,” explains Junker. “However, in central Africa, a much larger number of individuals could be affected, as ape densities are generally higher there,” he adds.

The authors of the work warn that their data falls short. They do not include those referring to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the largest country in Africa after Algeria. Up to 40% of chimpanzees, the only populations of bonobos, and the subspecies of mountain gorilla and eastern lowland gorillas are concentrated in its jungles. But, although the mines and mining projects are well known, most of them promoted by Chinese companies, they acknowledge that they have not obtained reliable data on the geographical distribution of the apes. Another impact that they have not been able to consider is that of artisanal mining, which is very relevant in most of these countries. By focusing their study on Africa, they have left out the other great ape, the orangutan. But previous works have shown how mining, after deforestation in favor of agriculture, is behind the reduction of their populations.

84% of the mining they have studied is still in the prospecting phase, so now is when the damage could be mitigated. Ideally, Junker says, “prioritize mining projects outside the ape habitat.” What is feasible, however, would be for mining companies to extend their mitigation plans both in time and geographically. They generally do not go beyond offsetting the impact beyond 10 kilometers and their plans do not last more than a decade. But reality does not match desires. The person in charge of the ape database at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History (Germany) and senior author of this work, Tenekwetche Sop, highlights that “companies operating in these areas should have adequate mitigation and compensation plans to minimize their impact, which seems unlikely given that most lack robust baseline data on the species required to inform these actions.”

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