- While a growing body of research highlights the impacts of climate change on wild apes, sanctuaries caring for apes are also feeling the impacts of a warming world.
- Sanctuaries across Africa are affected by changing weather patterns, including both droughts and floods, increasing the challenges of caring for resident apes.
- Extreme weather also increases the likelihood of human-wildlife conflict in conservation areas, and makes daily life more difficult for sanctuary staff and their families and communities.
In April 2024, above-average rainfall caused Kenya’s Ewaso Nyiro River to burst its banks, flooding the area and wreaking havoc for residents, including more than two dozen rescued chimpanzees at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary.
Recent research predicts that in the next three decades Africa’s apes will be increasingly affected by climate change, facing more extreme events like wildfires, floods and heat waves. However, it’s not just wild apes that are at risk when it comes to a warming world: great ape sanctuaries across the continent are feeling the heat too.
“Climate change has had a huge impact on the sanctuaries,” says Kaitlyn Bock, head of programs for the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA), a coalition of wildlife sanctuaries and centers across the continent. “All the markers of climate change have been affecting them and their operations. Everything from increased rainfall to exacerbated periods of drought.”
Bock says these changes seem to be happening rapidly across PASA’s 23 member organizations, which care for gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates.
“I think climate change is something that happens over time, you know, we’re seeing this happen gradually over many years … but for the sanctuaries, it doesn’t feel very gradual.”
Tourist facilities at Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary flooded as water levels in Lake Victoria, which surrounds the facility, reached unprecedented levels. Image Courtesy of Chimpanzee Sanctuary & Wildlife Conservation Trust in Uganda.
From extreme flooding to droughts
While climate change is affecting ape sanctuaries across the continent, it manifests in different ways. For example, flooding is the major concern in parts of East Africa.
Dr. Stephen Ngulu, manager and veterinarian at Sweetwaters, which is part of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, says unprecedented rainfall and flooding are contributing to an array of problems for the facility. When the Ewaso Nyiro River overflowed earlier this year, the flooding damaged fences and other infrastructure at the sanctuary and restricted the chimpanzees from accessing their larger enclosures.
“This severely impacts the chimpanzees’ welfare, and keeping them in confined areas heightens the risks of physical conflicts between chimpanzees,” Ngulu says, adding that these circumstances also increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks within the chimpanzee population.
Meanwhile, flooded roads hamper staff ability to access and assess areas for damage. Plus, difficult passage impacts the transport and cost of food and supplies.
“Such situations are deemed crises within a sanctuary,” Ngulu says.