Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.