Warming climates have chimps changing behaviours — but it can only go so far

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This week:

• Climate change is forcing chimps to confront their fears
• An award-winning photo captures a devastating fire season
• New Brunswick moves to pay farmers for conservation

Warming climates have chimps changing behaviours — but it can only go so far

For some species of chimpanzee, getting in the water is not what they would consider a good time, but climate change’s effects are forcing this great ape to do just that. 

“Many chimpanzees will sometimes be quite hydrophobic,” said Ammie Kalan, a primatologist at the University of Victoria. “But we’ll see chimps that live in these areas where it gets upwards of 40°C during the day … they will go and sit in pools of water.” 

While that doesn’t seem dramatic, it’s the trade-off of what they need to be doing during that time spent in the water or hiding in caves to beat the heat. 

“They cannot then go around foraging — what they would normally do during the day if they didn’t have to deal with [heat] stress,” Kalan told CBC News. 

This is just one of the behavioural changes warned about in a recent paper. It’s a sign that some animals can adjust to new realities that climate change brings to their environment, but only to a point. Experts also say chimps can’t just migrate to cooler areas and as it gets hotter, the animals may fight with others over ways to cool off. 

“We already see increased conflict for standing water resources,” said report author Stefanie Heinicke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “So where people are using standing water [for] their livestock, but then also chimpanzees use these resources to drink.” 

 A more alarming pressure for these animals is deforestation and the decline of natural habitats where they can cool down. 

Rachel Ikemeh, founder-director of the South-West/Niger Delta Forest Project, has been in conservation for 20 years. She works to protect species in Ise Forest, in Nigeria’s southwest. It’s a crucial site, she said, because it houses the endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee — a subspecies that was only classified in the late 1990s.

“We had the risk of actually losing a potential subspecies before they are even … officially confirmed.” 

Encroachment, deforestation and total fragmentation of the forest are “driving the population to extinction,” Ikemeh said.

While solutions can’t be one-size-fits-all and need to be community-specific, Ikemeh suggests protecting the forests is a start — and a win-win for humans and apes. 

“Forest regeneration helps to capture a lot of carbon,” said Ikemeh. “Having more standing forests, it’s very important to mitigating climate change.” 

By preserving the chimpanzees’ cool and shady forest habitats, humans protect a barrier against drought and food scarcity — both of which are exacerbated by climate change. 

— Anand Ram

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Reader feedback

Dennis Nella of North Vancouver, B.C. wrote:

“I found the story about Elizabeth Houlding’s efforts to get her pension fund to divest from fossil fuels interesting, and I applaud her. After hearing about students in various universities pressuring their institutions to divest from fossil fuels a few years ago, I asked my financial planner to do the same with my savings. After searching for the right fund that met my requirements, he eventually found one and we switched to it. The returns have been fine, and I’m now happy to not be funding the fossil fuel industry. I hope more people take this step.”

Many readers have also been writing lately with suggestions for topics to cover — we do read them, and they’re helpful in planning our future coverage, so please keep them coming. 

One recent note was from Ivy Grey, who wants to hear more about the impact of animal agriculture on the climate, and shared her personal experience: “Even as an ex-meat-lover, quitting meat and more recently dairy has been far more accessible to me than buying an electric car, getting solar panels installed or almost anything else, especially in terms of overall impact.”

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The Big Picture: A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew

This black-and-white photograph, captured last summer by Charles-Frédérick Ouellet and titled A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew, has just won the North and Central American Single Photograph award at the 2023 World Press Photo contest. Ouellet received auxiliary firefighter training for a documentary he was working on in order to be able to document crews’ work on the ground. He ended up pitching in with the province’s wildfire prevention agency, the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu (SOPFEU), last year. “This immersive approach has always been part of my way of doing photography,” he told CBC News. “I feel it’s sometimes more about understanding the people that you photograph, learning from them.” You can read more here.

— Verity Stevenson

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

New Brunswick moves to pay farmers who set aside land for conservation

Farmers in New Brunswick will be urged to leave parts of their land untilled under a new provincial program to motivate conservation.

Known as the Resilient Agricultural Landscape Program, provincial and federal funding will be used to reward farmers who increase the resilience of their farms.

It’s in part aimed at reducing tillage, which would allow certain sections of farmland to rest for a season or two, increasing the fertility of the land. The measure will also reward farmers who protect ponds, wetlands and pollinator habitats, covering up to $100,000 of an individual farmer’s or $150,000 of an agricultural producers association’s conservation expenses over the lifetime of the program.

John Russell, environmental farm plan facilitator with the Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick, which represents the province’s farmers, said the program will help both farmers and the environment beyond existing government programs.

Russell said it’s only fair for farmers to be rewarded for not using part of their land for the greater good of society.

“For the farmers, if they were farming that area in the past, then that’s going to be a loss for them,” Russell said. “So it’s a payment that could perhaps help them find new land close by that’s maybe more suitable or less needy of environmental protection.”

He added that losing productive, fertile land could be “quite a detriment to the farm,” and changes like that are a lot for farmers to consider.

Russell said while farmers might want to conserve parts of their property without incentives like this, any acreage that’s not used takes away from profits.

It’s often been local, family-run farms that have taken steps to protect acreage in the past, and it’s time for them to receive compensation for that loss, Russell said.

“A lot of our farms in the past, I think especially the woodlots, families have protected those because they felt a sentiment to protect those areas. But they never got compensated for it.”

In a news release, N.B. Agriculture Minister Margaret Johnson said that farmers are recognized as stewards of the land.

“However, some environmental beneficial management practices and land uses come at a significant expense to the farm,” Johnson said.

“This program will help incentivize farmers to further enhance their environmental stewardship for the benefit of everyone.”

With a demographic shift toward larger, corporate farms in recent decades across Canada, Russell said there’s an even greater need for protection, with larger farms often more focused on profit and getting returns from the land.

“I think some of our areas are more at risk of more intensive agriculture, and this will help protect some areas that we feel are more needy of protection,” Russell said.

“It’s good for the climate long-term, it’s good for production long-term and it’s good for all the ecosystems in that soil.”

While New Brunswick is breaking new ground with this program, it’s by no means unique. Nova Scotia adopted a similar program last year and Prince Edward Island has had one since 2018.

Both of those provinces have a special application stream for Indigenous farmers, but the New Brunswick release gives no indication if this will also apply here.

Bruce Nunn, a spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Department of Agriculture, said in an emailed statement that its program is going “very well.”

Since the program started, Nunn said there have been 59 applications from farms and slightly more than $1 million in funds have been distributed so far.

— Sam Farley

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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty