The world’s first superstar hippo lives in a zoo in Thailand. Mu Deng quickly became famous after she was born in July this year, thanks to a video in which she showed off her cute expressions and cheerful demeanor. However, the story of her species is not so happy, revealing the close links between extinction and the climate crisis.
The Moo Den is a pygmy hippo species that lives in the forests of West Africa. Unlike their larger and very fearsome cousins (regular hippos), pygmies are secretive creatures, preferring to hide in swamps and dense vegetation.
The pygmy hippopotamus is now officially listed as an endangered species. Conservationists Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng and Sulemana Bawa from the University of Oxford point out that 80% of primary forests have been lost. Only 2,500 individuals remain in the wild.
Read more: Mu Deng: The real home of the famous hippo has disappeared – can the world restore it?
“Perhaps the biggest cause of deforestation is cocoa production,” they write, “followed by gold mining and unsustainable logging. is infringing on the territory.”
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You probably didn’t want to hear this (I never did), but it appears that chocolate is contributing to the extinction of the pygmy hippopotamus. This pressure is unlikely to ease any time soon. Ivory Coast, where most of these hippos live, is also the world’s largest exporter of cocoa.
But it was another passage in their article that caught my eye. Zhang Zhen and Bawa said: “West Africa’s forest loss is particularly heartbreaking because studies show that the remaining swaths of land are among the most productive on Earth, potentially surpassing even the Amazon rainforest. This is because it is shown in “. (Productive in this context refers to the degree of plant growth).
Until extensive fieldwork began in 2016, researchers had underestimated the value of West Africa’s forests, particularly their ability to store carbon and offset global warming. This oversight is due in part to the fact that these forests are hidden by clouds, making satellite observations difficult, and to the relative neglect of forests by Western researchers compared to other ecosystems in other regions. This is due to the fact that
This made me wince. Was The Conversation part of this neglect? As it turns out, Jack and I have compiled dozens of articles about the Amazon and its role in the climate system, but relatively few about African forests.
Researchers are doing everything they can to highlight how important these forests are to the climate. Below is one of them, Michele Francis from South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, who writes about her research into the “sacred groves” of Togo, West Africa. “According to my calculations, one hectare of forest (about two and a half soccer fields) permanently removes the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is emitted by nearly 16 tons of coal-burning power plants. That’s it.”
Read more: West Africa’s ‘sacred forests’ capture carbon and keep soil healthy
little elephant walks in the water
But Africa’s largest forests are located a thousand miles southeast in the Congo Basin. The world’s second largest rainforest is almost half the size of the Amazon, but it only scratches the surface of its global fame.
Forests are poorly researched, so there are still major discoveries to be made. Back in 2017, Simon Lewis and Greta Dargie from the University of Leeds led a British-Congolese team to explore a UK-sized tropical peatland (the world’s largest) beneath wetlands deep in the Congolese jungle. Created a map for the first time. They wrote about this in The Conversation at the time:
After 17 days of traveling just 1.5 km a day, we finally reached the center of the swamp between two large rivers. Our takeaway wasn’t just the knowledge that these peatlands are actually vast. They also discovered the deepest peat ever, reaching up to 5.9 meters, almost the height of a two-story building.
Read more: How we discovered the world’s largest tropical peatland deep in the Congo jungle
Peat is made of partially decomposed plant matter and can store huge amounts of carbon. “We discovered that this new ecosystem, which no one knew existed, was storing 30 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to 20 years of current U.S. fossil fuel emissions,” Lewis and Dargie said. Masu.”
This rainforest and its vast carbon stores are under threat. In 2022, Mr Lewis warned in a letter to Leeds colleague Bert Creasy that oil drilling plans in the Democratic Republic of Congo could be “the beginning of the end for these peatlands”.
Read more: Congo’s peat swamps store three years’ worth of the world’s carbon emissions – which could be released by impending oil drilling
They updated maps of Congo’s peatlands and overlaid them with maps of proposed oil concessions. They discovered:
The upcoming sale of fossil fuel exploration rights will include nearly 1 million hectares of peat swamp forest. It is estimated that if destroyed by the construction of roads, pipelines and other infrastructure needed for oil extraction, up to 6 billion tonnes of CO₂ could be released, which is more than the current UK greenhouse gas emissions. Equivalent to 14 years of emissions.
In late 2023, the Democratic Republic of the Congo postponed its oil drilling plans. At least for the time being, it appears that scientists’ voices have really been heard.
But oil drilling in vast stretches of forest is just one threat. Researchers led by Judith Verweijen from the University of Antwerp have written about armed conflict and mining affecting the same eastern edge of the Congo Basin.
Read more: Mining and armed conflict threaten biodiversity in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
For example, mines degrade soil and pollute water, so trees must be cut down to make way for them.
However, Verweijen and colleagues note that “there are also indirect impacts resulting from the construction of new roads to provide access to mining sites and from population growth around mines.” This leads to the exploitation of further natural resources, such as the extraction of wood for fuel and construction, the hunting of bushmeat, and the relocation of agriculture. ”
None of these have sparked the same global outcry as the Amazon fires or Indonesia’s palm oil deforestation. What can solve it?
Back to Mu Deng. Many conservationists would say that a single, well-known species can be the key to saving an entire ecosystem and its boring but important biodiversity. Protecting tigers, pandas and pygmy hippos also ensures the survival of earthworms, ants and peat bogs.
If Africa’s disappearing rainforests needed a viral hippo to at least get some attention, so be it.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
