Sloth Sanctuary Suriname sequel: the whole story!

As we already let you know in our first report this year, we had a very busy start of 2019. Not only with meetings and trainings, and thinking of where we want to focus our attention in the coming years. We also had many many rescues. And these rescues were due to what we think was an unusual dry period that started in January.

And I have to mention the elephant in the room...the problem of climate change facing Suriname is real and enormous. With 90 percent of our infrastructure in the low-lying coastal zone, Suriname will suffer great consequences from sea level rise and the effects of climate change. The effects are already starting to show in terms of stronger winds, shifting seasons, more extreme weather events during the different seasons, such as more rainfall causing flooding and longer droughts. Strong winds and small tornados cause damage to our infrastructure, like our houses, but also to our forests. Small tornados can cause the destruction of complete forest patches in a matter of minutes.

Climate change has a direct effect on the lives of the animals we work with. In the past months we did not only have an increase in rescues, sometimes one per day and sometimes more than one per day, but we also saw an increase in the animals that arrived in a poor condition. In a period of 3 months we had 63 rescues, while we normally rescue around 150 animals per year. A lot of animals were dehydrated, requiring subcutaneous fluids, and some were so badly dehydrated that we could not help them anymore. In addition, we had an increase in very small infants, weighing under 300 g, that had been abandoned by their mothers. None of these survived. We are not yet sure, how and if flooding and extreme rain is also going to affect the animals similarly.

Suriname is a country with almost 90% forest cover and a small population of around 550,000 people, we are a country that has contributed little to man-made climate change. There is little we can do to stop the industrialized world from doing business as usual and continuing to pump greenhouse gases in the air. So the most we can do in our country is to think of adaptive measures that will ensure that we can survive as a society and help us build our infrastructure beyond the zone of immediate impact. The only thing I kept thinking of when the drought was so pervasive, is how we could use the enormous freshwater potential of our country to maintain our forests now and in the future by devising smart irrigation methods that will keep our forests alive, and the animals (and people) that depend on them.

Jinkoe, one of the sloths that moved with us from my house to the new center and who became one of the first animals to make the sloth wellness center her home, unfortunately may have fallen victim to the effects of this severe drought. I wrote a special piece about her life at the center. Anna who had a baby earlier this year, probably lost her baby also as a result of the drought. It is with this reflection on these changes that are occurring that I end the report for this period. Planting trees, replenishing the forests and restoring biodiversity are what is foremost in my mind at this moment.

Thank you for your continued support, and please keep an eye out for the upcoming Paws + Claws Matching campaign on the 22nd of May in honour of the International Day of Biological Diversity.