Palm oil company forced to give a monkey's about, well, monkeys
It's not every day that a corporation buckles under the pressure of an environmental campaign. But last Friday, a leading palm oil company in the Ivory Coast was forced by green groups to abandon its plan to turn a pocket of pristine swampland forest into a plantation. (Palm oil was once viewed as the ideal carbon-neutral biofuel to replace fossil fuels, but has since experienced massive opposition from conservationists.)
Why?
Protecting the Ivory Coast's swamps sits high on most environmentalists' to-do lists because peat bog releases large amounts of carbon dioxide when it is converted to oil palm plantation. Healthy bogs absorb and store CO2. But drained bogs decay rapidly, releasing the carbon they contain into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. To make matters worse, tropical swamps are able to absorb and store about 80% more carbon than temperate wetlands.
Environmentalists have also balked at the idea of turning West Africa's 'most threatened hotspot' for primates into farmland because over half of all primates are facing extinction due to deforestation. Many monkeys - like the Roloway, a charcoal-coloured animal that scares other monkeys by raising its eyebrows to expose a 'sweat band' of white fur - are rare or extinct outside this 12,000 hectare zone.
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