In a report released ahead of an international conference next week on saving the highly endangered species from total annihilation, it said habitat destruction posed as great a threat to great apes as poaching and disease.

At least 90 percent of areas now inhabited by great apes -- gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy chimps) in Africa and orangutans in southeast Asia -- will be affected within 30 years unless urgent action is taken now, UNEP said.

"If current trends continue, by 2032: 99 percent of the orangutan range will suffer medium to high impact from human development, as will 90 percent of the gorrilla range, 92 percent of the chimpanzee range and 92 percent of the bonobo range," it said.

The findings are contained in a "World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation," which was issued in London amid preparations for the first governmental meeting of a UN-backed scheme to preserve the species.

That meeting, to be held September 5-9 in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, will gather officials from 23 so-called "great ape range states" that make up the UN-backed Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP).

The atlas will be a major focus of the meeting which is a continuation of GRASP's launch in Paris in 2003 with the goal of sustaining existing great ape populations and boosting them 2010.

Billed as the "most comprehensive compendium of information about great apes ever compiled," the atlas "will be used to focus international attention for an 11th-hour conservation effort," UNEP said.

"We have a duty to rescue our closest living relatives as part of our wider responsibility to conserve the ecosystem they inhabit," Nairobi-based UNEP's executive director Klaus Toepfer said in a statement.

In Africa, 70 percent of great ape habitats have been negatively affected by some sort of human encroachment, a figure that falls by only six percent for orangutan habitats in Malaysia and Indonesia, according to surveys.

"Careful management of their forests and mountain habitats is absolutely vital as we try to balance and resolve the conflicts between apes and humans," said British biodiversity minister Jim Knight.

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