World Wildlife Fund Says: Buying Products Made From Sustainable Forests Saves the Great Apes

African eastern lowland gorillas. Photo courtesy of thewildsource.com

When we commonly think of voting power, we think of political elections, or calling into television talent shows, but possibly where we show our greatest voting power is when we shop.

The World Wildlife Fund is working to encourage people to use their day-to-day shopping decisions as a way to foster a more sustainable planet for all creatures. One area where the WWF believes this strategy can be most effective is in the preservation of forests around the world.

“U.S. consumers can use their purchasing power to promote responsibility and species protection by buying Forest Stewardship Council-certified products, which are increasingly available,” said Linda Kramme, manager of the WWF’s Global Forest and Trade Network of North America.

FSC-certified products include paper, toys, and furniture, which can be identified by the council’s label.

FSC certification label. Stock photo.

Ms. Kramme made her remarks as the WWF released its report, Great Apes and Logging, highlighting concerns that more great apes are living outside of formal protected areas, where logging is the most common land use. In many instances, this has contributed to species’ population declines resulting from increased pouching and habitat destruction.

“In the past 50 years, the number of great apes living in the wild has been cut in half,” said Matt Lewis, senior program officer for African Species Conservation, adding the belief that, “market-oriented solutions like responsibly managed forestry can help save them (the apes), along with stricter poaching controls and increasing protected areas.”

The report itself finds that all four species of great apes (chimpanzees, booboos, western and eastern gorillas) are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, which describes them as critically endangered. The vast majority of the great ape population resides in the forests of the Congo Basin, running from Gabon to Western Uganda.

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.

“The area of forest in this region is expected to decline by 30 percent in the next 50 years. More than half of the gorilla and chimpanzees in the Western Congo Basin reside in logging concessions, while only 17 percent dwell in protected areas,” said the report.

Similar statistics were shown for the Borneo orangutans. “It is estimated that in the last century the Borneo orangutan lost 80 percent of its habitat and its continued existence is endangered,” said the report, which as a conservation effort recommends that “the governments of both producer and consumer countries must make (FSC) certified timber more commercially attractive.”

The report concluded that “the most significant advantage of FSC over other logging (clear cutting, conventional non-selective, and selective) is that FSC standards combine selective logging with the avoidance of negative indirect effects.

“In FSC concessions, for example, hunting is countered by closing off and guarding the roads. Fruit trees, which are important to the great apes, are not felled and important territories are specified as high conservation value forests and left undisturbed.”

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