‘Nature can recover’: Inside the race to rescue world’s crisis-hit wildlife

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What happened

Features | Wildlife ‘Nature can recover’: Inside the race to rescue world’s crisis-hit wildlife There is a spark of hope for a natural world beset by crisis, as conservation efforts succeed amid a 73 percent drop in wildlife numbers. ‘Nature can recover’: Inside the race to rescue world’s crisis-hit wildlife A family of endangered mountain gorillas is seen resting in the forest of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwest Uganda, in September 2018 [File: Lorena de la SOPA LightRocket via Getty Images] the dense forest canopy of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a troop of gorillas is being quietly observed by a group of tourists who have each paid $800 for the privilege of the experience.

What we know

In villages around the park, a thriving economy has grown off the back of the gorillas’ presence here, from the sale of wood carvings to visitors and the provision of accommodation for up to 40,000 tourists a year. In the national park, which sprawls along the edge of the Rift Valley and the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), there are many local jobs for rangers and guides. But deeper into the forest, more mountain gorillas live away from human contact, quietly enhancing the natural world around them through their daily routines of foraging, nest building and dispersing seeds. And, crucially, by increasing their own populations. In the 1980s, the mountain gorilla was on the fast track to extinction. Now, there are more than 1,100 living in thriving populations in Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC.

Originally reported by Al Jazeera.

Read the original report at Al Jazeera →