Environment

Ape Goes Extinct in China: Missing in the forests and in the press

(Image via Science Daily)

The white-handed gibbon, which used to live in Yunnan Province, has been declared extinct after not having been seen for twenty years. Scientists are calling the loss particularly tragic since the sub-species was unique to China.

It joins a long list of long-gone (or almost gone) monkeys and apes in China.

What I find equally absent is the coverage of the Gibbon’s final death in China or environmental news. A handful of sites picked it up like gokunming.com, an expat news and lifestyle website, and sciencecentric.com, all quoting the same source from sciencedaily.com.

The loss is another strike to biodiversity, which is important to humans for a number of reasons:

• maintaining clean and healthy water and air
• offering biological resources such as medicine and plants
• keeping us from relying on too few food crops (which protects us from crop failure) and high price

Such natural processes are worth trillions of dollars annually. Yet because most of their benefits are not traded in economic markets, they carry no price tags that could alert society to changes in their supply or the deterioration of underlying ecological systems that generate them.

For further reading on the importance of biodiversity to humans, our society and our economy, check out any of the links above or “Sustaining Life: How Human Life Depends on Biodiversity.”

Biodiversity is on the radar screen for companies practicing CSR in Asia. A few examples:

• CSR Asia listed biodiversity as one of the top CSR focuses in Asia in 2007
• Titan Chemicals and the United Nations Development Programme teamed up for a biodiversity project in Malaysia in 2005

If you have any further leads on who is reporting on the “ke lian” gibbon, please comment and let us know!

Sphere: Related Content

© 2008 ResponsibleChina.com: Environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship in China..