Africa’s highest mountain has become a beacon for climate change because the famous snows of Kilimanjaro are melting.  I’m climbing Kili@60 with a team from the PATT Foundation to raise awareness of climate change and raise funds for wildlife charities – and these two critical causes are connected.

Wild Futures www.wildfutures.org is a charity that rescues monkeys in the UK and promotes their conservation in the wild.  It celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year.  Founded by the late Leonard Williams in 1964, it began life as The Monkey Sanctuary in Cornwall, caring for woolly monkeys rescued from the pet trade.  As a teenager in Hull, I was greatly influenced by Leonard Williams’ books describing monkey behaviour and the success he had in building the sanctuary.   The monkeys thrived, it seemed, because of the mutual respect between them and the humans who cared for them.   In the summer of 1974, I hitch-hiked down from Keele University to Cornwall and volunteered for a while at the Sanctuary, experiencing for myself the extraordinary interactions between two complex communities – human and non-human.   Many years (and many visits) later, I was flattered to be invited to serve as Patron for Wild Futures as their work expanded to include rescuing other species of primate and inspirational conservation education both in the UK and in Latin America.     

What is the link to climate change?   By campaigning to end the primate pet trade and protect monkeys in their natural habitat in South and Central America, Wild Futures helps to restore and maintain healthy forest ecosystems. Primates are keystone species in tropical forests, sometimes called the ‘Gardeners of the Forest’.   As they feed on leaves, flowers, nectar and fruit, they prune, pollinate, act as seed dispersal agents and fertilise the forest with their droppings.   Most tropical tree species depend on animals to disperse their seeds, and each huge, towering, centuries-old rainforest trees we see today is the result of an ecological event hundreds of years ago when, say, a monkey ate a fruit, swallowed the seed and the next day deposited it in nutrient-rich dung far from the parent plant.   If we want tropical forests to continue storing carbon, generating rainfall and stabilising our climate for centuries to come, we MUST protect the primates and other animals today.   By supporting Wild Futures you are helping to change the way people perceive primates – respecting them for their intelligence and understanding their role in the ecosystems which, even if distant, sustain us all.