More than a third of the great ape population in Africa is endangered by mining, according to a new study. The threat to these 180,000 chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas has so far been underestimated, wrote scientists from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in the journal Science Advances. The increasing demand for important minerals such as copper, lithium, cobalt and rare earths, which are needed for the large-scale transition to clean energy, has led to a boom in mining in Africa, they say. There are also other direct and indirect effects, such as the constructio…