In the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo, amidst the remote wetlands of the Kamalondo Depression, a fleeting moment has reignited hope for one of Africa’s most elusive antelopes. The Upemba lechwe (Kobus anselli), unseen by science for decades, has finally been captured in a photograph—an image that may serve as both a testament to its resilience and a clarion call for its conservation.

In March 2025, during an aerial survey over the Zone Annex of  Upemba National Park, researchers observed a few of these rare antelopes moving through the swamps. While most of them vanished into the thick reeds, one individual paused just long enough for biologist Manuel Weber to take a photo—the first ever published photograph of this animal alive. Until now, the Upemba lechwe had been known only from museum specimens and field reports, its existence bordering on legend.

Vanishing Into the Marshes

Once numbering in the thousands in the 1970s, the Upemba lechwe’s population has plummeted due to decades of poaching. The recent aerial count found only ten individuals, suggesting that fewer than 100 survive. These antelopes, with their golden-brown coats and unique physical features, are now restricted to a single, shrinking range in the western portion of Upemba National Park.

With its long, lyre-shaped horns and swamp-adapted limbs, the Upemba lechwe is a wetland specialist—an ecological jewel in a vast floodplain. But without swift action, it may disappear before the world truly gets to know it.

Upemba – One of Africa’s Best-Kept Biodiversity Secrets

The Upemba landscape stretches over two ecological structures that are known for their endemism: The Kibara and Manika/Biano grassland plateaus, on the one hand, are known for their endemism particularly in dragonflies, plants, and birds. On the other hand, the Kamalondo depression wetlands  are a hotspot in fish diversity, with at least 2 endemic birds, and the Upemba lechwe.

Yet, although great work over the last 80 years has illustrated this, many of the elements are poorly documented, still unknown, or “lost to science” due to no recent records. Adding to that the mounting anthropogenic pressures, they are facing a situation with high stakes in terms of conservation.

“It is for this reason that we are trying to work on baselines of the status of Upemba’s biodiversity, to direct our management efforts where it is most needed,” said Manuel Weber.

The Upemba Lechwe is an important piece in the puzzle, since large mammals are the first taxon that vanishes, and because the population is endemic to the Kamalondo depression. This comes with great responsibilities for the park, since the success of the park’s efforts may be decisive on the survival or extinction of this population.

Conservation frontlines

Upemba National Park is no stranger to hardship. Once plagued by militia activity and dubbed the “triangle of death,” the park is now in the midst of a hopeful transformation.

The lechwe in Upemba National Park faces mounting threats, primarily from meat poaching and the increasing encroachment of agriculture into its habitat. Local poverty makes bushmeat a tempting source of income, placing significant pressure on this vulnerable species.

In response, targeted anti-poaching strategies are being developed, including the planned establishment of a new ranger outpost to boost surveillance and deterrence. Despite current resource limitations, efforts are underway to train and deploy 80 new rangers by September, strengthening the park’s protection capacity.

Community engagement is also a key pillar, with awareness campaigns focusing on the lechwe and other species. Alternative protein sources such as fish farming and improved fisheries are being introduced to reduce reliance on bushmeat and promote more sustainable livelihoods.

Immediate conservation actions

The following immediate conservation actions are being prioritized to safeguard the Upemba lechwe and reduce threats to its survival:

1. Establishing a permanent presence of rangers in the species’ core habitat to mitigate poaching and monitor the population.
2. Conducting additional ground and aerial surveys across the entire Kamalondo Depression to refine population estimates and assess human encroachment (and collect samples for genetic analysis).
3. Collecting data on the pressures affecting the species and evaluating the feasibility of in situ protection measures.
4. Deploying community conservation teams modeled on the successful “Hugo teams” from Virunga National Park. These teams will be composed of trained local residents who act as frontline conservation agents—raising awareness, monitoring wildlife, reporting threats, and serving as liaisons between the park and surrounding communities. Their presence will also help reduce pressure on the lechwe’s habitat and discourage poaching.

Community engagement

Currently, local communities are not involved in protecting the Upemba lechwe or included in awareness efforts—an urgent gap the park is now addressing. By engaging communities directly, the park aims to build local stewardship for the lechwe and its wetland habitat. This approach will be reinforced through broader sensitization campaigns and alternative livelihood options like sustainable fisheries and agriculture to reduce pressure on critical ecosystems.

Long term strategies

Saving the Upemba lechwe from extinction is about more than protecting a single species—it’s about securing an entire landscape with extraordinary but overlooked conservation value. By building Upemba’s profile around this rare antelope, the parks aims to raise awareness and catalyze action.

The lechwe share their habitat with Katanga’s elephants and other key species like the endemic black-lored waxbill. As a flagship species, the lechwe can serve as an umbrella for broader biodiversity conservation in the Kamalondo Depression, helping to protect this vital and vulnerable ecosystem as a whole.

How does the rediscovery of the Upemba lechwe influence broader conservation strategies in the region?

The rediscovery of the Upemba lechwe is a powerful reminder of the ecological richness of the Upemba landscape, one of the most unique ecosystems in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although this species and the landscape itself have been largely overlooked for many years, the lechwe’s continued existence underscores the urgent need to refocus conservation attention and resources on this critical region.

This rediscovery reinforces the message that Upemba is not a forgotten landscape, but a national treasure that holds immense value for biodiversity, culture, and future generations. The lechwe, endemic to this ecosystem, is now a symbol of what is at stake. Its critically endangered status places a collective responsibility on all stakeholders, from local communities, government institutions, conservation partners, and to the international community to act decisively to prevent its extinction.

“We hope that the rediscovery of the Upemba lechwe generates attention for the landscape, and that this attention can be translated into conservation efforts that reflect the complexity of the landscape—in other words, that they yield ecologically sustainable outcomes while being socially acceptable,” said Tina Lain, park manager of Upemba.

How can the international community support the conservation of the Upemba lechwe?

The international community can play a critical role by elevating the Upemba lechwe to a global conservation priority—just as it did with the mountain gorillas of the Virunga Massif. With fewer than 100 individuals remaining, urgent and coordinated action is needed to prevent extinction, beginning with the protection of the species’ last remaining habitat.

Despite its ecological significance, the Upemba landscape remains under threat. An oil block overlapping this fragile area has been open for exploration since 2022, posing a major risk to the lechwe and the broader wetland ecosystem. Industrial developments such as oil extraction have no place in this irreplaceable biodiversity refuge.

Strong political will from the DRC, supported by sustained international technical and financial backing, is essential. Equally important is investing in alternatives that promote local development while safeguarding conservation goals—such as sustainable livelihoods, habitat restoration, and inclusive, community-led conservation.

Saving the Upemba lechwe is not only about protecting a species on the brink; it’s about securing the future of one of the DRC’s most biodiverse yet overlooked ecosystems. The time to act is now.

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Abdullahi explained that President Muhammadu Buhari had sent a request to the Senate on November 16th, 2022, seeking the Senate’s agreement to the National Park declaration Order, 2022, in compliance with section 18 of the National Park Service Act 2004. The proposed order aimed to establish ten additional national parks based on thorough feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments in twelve selected forests and game reserves located in different states of the federation.

The list of proposed parks includes:

• Alawa National Park in Niger State,
• Apoi National Park in Bayelsa State,
• Edumenun National Park in Bayelsa State,
• Galgore National Park in Kano State,
• Hadejia Wetland National Park in Jigawa State,
• Kempe National Park in Kwara State,
• Kogo National Park in Katsina State,
• Marhi National Park in Nasarawa State,
• Oba Hill National Park in Osun State, and
• Pandam National Park in Plateau State.

According to Abdullahi, the establishment of these additional parks is crucial for the regulation of Nigeria’s unique ecosystem, particularly the fauna and flora ecosystems. “The establishment will address the fast rate of disappearance and degradation of Nigeria’s forest, achieve and develop adequate tourism infrastructure in line with international best practices,” he said. He also emphasized that the creation of these parks would help protect and preserve Nigeria’s biodiversity and natural heritage.

The approval of 10 new national parks in Nigeria is a significant development that will play a vital role in protecting the country’s unique ecosystem and natural heritage. With the fast rate of disappearance and degradation of Nigeria’s forests, these parks will serve as a vital tool in regulating the use of the country’s flora and fauna ecosystems.

The establishment of these parks will also provide an opportunity for the development of adequate tourism infrastructure in line with international best practices, potentially boosting the country’s tourism industry.

—
Photo: Francesco Ungaro

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What does this look like when we scale down to the country level?

Our research focuses on Kenya – a country renowned for its natural environment, in particular its large mammals such as elephants, rhinos and lions. We looked into whether Kenya’s protected areas and policies adequately conserve its less well known mammals, birds, and amphibians.

We examined a total of 1,535 species. We used this snapshot of the country’s biodiversity because of the availability of data for these groups and because many are under threat.

In Kenya, protected areas that are governed by wildlife laws fall under three categories. These are: national parks (managed by the Kenya Wildlife Service), national reserves (managed by county governments) and conservancies. National parks and reserves cover about 8% of the country’s land surface. About 160 conservancies protect about 11% of Kenya’s land.

These protected areas were generally established in areas with large populations of big mammals and are the focus of the current wildlife policy. This policy aims to protect these species inside national parks and reserves and help landowners coexist with wildlife in conservancies. It gives landowners the right to benefit from wildlife, for example through revenue from eco-toursim and compensation for the costs of living with wildlife.

The number of wildlife conservancies has grown to protect the many of the large mammals which are found outside government protected areas.

Despite this, we found that only 16% of amphibian species, 45% of birds, and 41% of mammals are adequately conserved within government run protected areas and conservancies. Many species need attention in areas that are not supported by wildlife policies or laws.

Kenya is developing a new wildlife policy and conservation master plan. Protected areas and conservancies must be supported. But our research shows that new and innovative wildlife policies and practices are needed to adequately protect many of Kenya’s species.

Collecting data

For our study, we developed a data set that categorised land into different types of use:

• protected areas and conservancies (which are covered by current wildlife policy),
• forest reserves (managed by Kenya Forest Service),
• rangelands (areas grazed by livestock),
• forests, urban areas and agriculture.

We then used data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature database and Birdlife International to examine whether a species’ range was within a protected area, which other land-use options were important for conservation and which species needed more of their range to be protected.

Finally we used data on the human footprint – which includes information on built environments, cropland, human population density, night‐time lights, railways and roads. It allowed us to assess how pressure from people affects various species and which types of land use exert the highest pressures.

Inadequate protected areas

We found that many of the areas with the highest numbers of different species are found where considerable human pressures exist. These are often farmland areas, close to development, or rangelands. Substantial conservation efforts outside protected areas, and beyond the current policy focus, are required to ensure the longevity of these species in Kenya.

Worryingly, 80 species weren’t covered by any protected area at all. Many face immediate threats from human activities to their survival – such as the critically endangered Taita warty frog (Callulina dawida).

The highest density of large mammals is found in areas with the lowest human pressures. This is currently where wildlife policy focuses. Yet we show with locally acquired data that the number of bird and plant species can be highest in areas with considerable human pressures.

This same trend can be found in wildlife policies across much of the continent: a focus on protected areas and large mammals, with little consideration for broader biodiversity in systems dominated by humans.

Rangelands, farms and cities

Of all land uses we assessed, rangelands – which cover 67% of the country and mostly drier areas – are extremely important for conservation efforts. They cover the largest area of land and provide range for the majority of species.

Conserving wildlife and biodiversity in rangelands, which are dominated by livestock, is both possible and necessary.

People and animals can co-exist in these areas. For instance in Kenya’s rift valley there are communities that protect large tracts of land to support the free movement of people, livestock and wildlife.

Urban and agricultural areas are often overlooked and are also important for conservation.

For instance, there’s a mosaic of green space in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi – in the form of a national park, urban parks, forest reserves and residential gardens. It hosts as many bird species as the Maasai Mara national reserve. As cities grow, urban planning needs to consider biodiversity.

Lessons can be learnt from cities such as London and Washington DC. London, for example, supports key species by protecting open spaces and their habitat.

Taking care of forest patches within farmland is also crucial. In southern Uganda, for example, preserving forest patches in intensive agricultural land may benefit some bird species.

Future conservation efforts

Kenya needs to prioritise conservation interventions at the national level, across land-use types to conserve a large number of its mammals, birds and amphibians. To do this, policymakers must use data to identify key areas of habitat and species range that can be conserved.

Kenya should also develop “National Red Lists”, as has been done in Uganda and South Africa. This could help target action for threatened species.

To monitor progress, there should be local programmes to collect and summarise data on the environment, biodiversity, land use, human demographics and economic indicators. This will help to prioritise action too.

Our research echoes international calls for landscape‐based approaches to conservation. The call is to balance competing land uses in a way that is best for human well-being and the environment. This would mean policy reforms that integrate conservation with all other sectors of land use.

Without this, landscapes in Africa may end up in a similar situation to those of Europe and America, needing expensive, large-scale restoration and recovery strategies to protect biodiversity.

Peadar Brehony, PhD Candidate (University of Cambridge), who has focused on the impact that conservation efforts have on socio-ecological systems, contributed to this article.

Peter Tyrrell, PhD Candidate and Mistler Graduate Scholar, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A proposed Northern Serengeti all-weather tarmac road that will bisect Serengeti National Park, a World Heritage site, has sparked considerable debate. Opponents say that the road could disrupt the migration of approximately 1.5 million wildebeest, zebras and gazelles between Serengeti National Park and Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, and increase already high levels of poaching. Proponents, on the other hand, argue that the road will facilitate national and local economic growth, which in turn will reduce poverty and improve the local quality of life, which is expected to lower pressure on ecosystems.

Research instead of ‘Build first – worry later’

The pros and cons of road projects proposed for remote areas with high biodiversity conservation value are rarely examined before they are built in the explosion of road expansion projects that are currently underway in many developing countries.

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have used a method called a discrete choice experiment to determine how road development would affect local peoples livelihood activity choices in the Serengeti area. A discrete choice experiment allows researchers to use hypothetical scenarios to measure the strength of preferences and trade-offs for local people regarding different livelihood options. The study is published in PLOS One.

Contradicting outcomes
Solomon Zenas Walelign, one of the authors of the study and postdoc at University of Copenhagen, says construction of the road could result in one of two contrasting outcomes.

“One possible outcome is that increased market integration will allow intensification of existing crop and livestock production, and the development of non-farm micro, small and medium enterprises, both of which will reduce environmental resource extraction. However, a contrasting outcome predicts that people will expand existing production, which will lead to land conversion and overgrazing and commercialisation of hunting to meet urban market demands,” Solomon Zenas Walelign says.

Informed policy making
“The effect of roads on livelihood activity choices can typically only be observed after the implementation, which prevents the design of timely mitigating policies and strategies. We used the discrete choice experiment to see how people expect to change their livelihoods,” said Jette Brehdal Jacobsen, professor at University of Copenhagen.

The study helps shed light on how local communities in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem expect to adjust their livelihoods in response to road improvement. This information is urgently needed to enable informed predictions about emerging and changing environmental pressures that result from land use change, overgrazing and the bushmeat trade.

People prefer more of the known
The study found that people did not expect to increase effort hunting bushmeat – but they did not plan to reduce the number of household members engaged in bushmeat hunting either. However, the clearest result was a strong preference for traditional livelihood activities, adding more agricultural land and more livestock, as travel time to markets was reduced through road improvements.

“The results indicate that if new roads are constructed or old ones upgraded, people will prefer to expand their traditional activities by converting more land to cropland and increasing the number of cattle in the region. Together, these changes will likely increase illegal grazing pressure in the protected areas, which is already a major conservation concern in Serengeti National Park,” says Associate Professor Martin Reinhardt Nielsen, who is one of the leaders of the AfricanBioServices project, which financed the study.

Another path for the impact of road building
The authors of the study suggest that land use planning and control of land use conversion and illegal grazing is critical when constructing and upgrading roads in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem. This should be combined with education programmes and strategic efforts to encourage the development of local non-farm micro, small and medium enterprises that are alligned with conservation goals and take advantage of the large tourism income potential in the ecosystem.

Facts
– Assuming that land was available, the study predicted an average increase of 1.54 acres of cultivated land and 1.43 cattle per household.
– The study did not find any evidence that local people would take up new wage-earning opportunities or engage in business development as travel time to markets was reduced.
– Low-interest loans and extension services could help modify the preference for extra land, but only to a limited extent, the researchers found.

AfricanBioServices
AfricanBioServices is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme and is investigating how climate change, population growth and changing land use affect both biodiversity and local communities in the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem, with the goal of designing new approaches to sustainable development.

africanbioservices.eu/

PLOS ONE: Roads and livelihood activity choices in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem, Tanzania

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The park’s violent past intrigued Daskin, then a first-year Princeton graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. As he explored the savannas and grasslands of Gorongosa with his advisor, Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, they discussed whether similar wildlife declines might have occurred across Africa during the many conflicts of the 20th century. If so, they wondered how severe the impacts had been, and if animals generally retain the capacity to rebound like those in Gorongosa had, or if war was a human pressure that most animals just couldn’t withstand.

After years of examining conflict in Africa’s protected areas, Daskin and Pringle reported in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature that war has been a consistent factor in the decades-long decline of large mammals in Africa. Populations that were stable in peaceful areas needed only a slight increase in conflict frequency to begin a downward spiral. But, the researchers report, while wildlife populations declined in conflict areas, they rarely collapsed to the point where recovery was impossible.

The researchers found that more than 70 percent of Africa’s protected areas were touched by war between 1946 and 2010, an era during which the overthrow of European colonial rule was followed in many countries by violent post-colonial power struggles. Elephants, hippos, giraffes and other large mammals perished as combatants and hungry citizens hunted animals for meat and for marketable commodities such as ivory.

Nonetheless, said Daskin, who completed the study as part of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton, the findings show that even those protected areas most severely affected by conflict remain promising candidates for conservation and rehabilitation efforts. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI).

“We hope our data and conclusions will help in the effort to prioritize these areas for attention and funding from their governments and from international NGOs,” said Daskin, now a Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. “We’re presenting evidence that although mammal populations decline in war zones, they don’t often go extinct. With the right policies and resources, it should often be possible to reverse the declines and restore functional ecosystems, even in historically conflict-prone areas.”

The study was needed to establish a general scientific expectation about how conflict typically affects wildlife populations, said Pringle, who is associated faculty in PEI.

“It wasn’t obvious to us in advance that conflict would have negative effects on wildlife populations,” Pringle said. “Different studies of different places at different times have found both positive and negative effects of conflict on biodiversity, but the overall net effect had never been measured.” For instance, previous research has shown that animal populations have increased in contested regions such as the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and rural Zimbabwe during that country’s Bush War of 1964–1979.

Daskin and Pringle, however, found that with few exceptions, frequent conflict resulted in a downward trend among large-animal populations. No other factor they evaluated exhibited the same consistent effect. There was no statistically detectable effect on wildlife trajectories from mining, urban development, corruption, drought, or even the intensity of the conflict as measured by the number of human battle fatalities.

“This enabled us to make some educated guesses about what the underlying mechanisms might be,” Daskin said. “Most of the effects of conflict on wildlife populations seem to be due to knock-on socioeconomic effects that degrade the institutional capacity for biodiversity conservation, or the collective societal ability to prioritize and pay for it.”

Hugh Possingham, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, concurred that social structures ultimately determine the fate of animals and protected areas. Possingham had no role in the research but is familiar with it and has published on related topics.

“The most surprising finding is the strength of the relationship between the presence of conflict and declines in large mammals,” Possingham said. “One might have imagined that the magnitude or scale of conflict would be the driver, but the mere presence of conflict seems to be a strong predictor in its own right.

“This is unusual and useful,” he continued. “It suggests to me that any sort of conflict needs to be avoided, even if it’s at a low level, and such conflicts may be indicative of broader social and institutional problems that are the primary drivers of mammal declines. Bottom line — to stop threats such as bushmeat hunting, governance really has to be strong.”

Daskin and Pringle found that 71 percent of Africa’s protected areas experienced one or more conflicts from 1946 to 2010. For a quarter of these areas, wars occurred for an average of nine or more years. Several large nations experienced an average of 20 or more years of conflict per protected area, including Chad, Namibia and Sudan (before it split into Sudan and South Sudan in 2011).

To conduct the analysis, Daskin drew from nearly 500 sources to find estimates of a specific animal species’ abundance from at least two years between 1946 and 2010. He compared those estimates in order to calculate the change in population density during a given time interval. Daskin then used a series of databases to identify how many conflicts overlapped with each of Africa’s protected areas during the study interval. In the end, the researchers examined the trends of 253 animal populations representing 36 species, ranging from antelopes to elephants, in 126 protected areas across 19 countries.

“No one else had made the effort to assemble conflict data across this range of parks and make them talk with the wildlife data,” Daskin said. “These data were all freely available, but not always highly accessible.”

Gorongosa, the park in Mozambique that originally inspired the study, exemplifies the thrust of the findings, Daskin and Pringle said. From 1977 to 1992, government soldiers, anti-government militias, and refugees alternately fought in or fled through the park. For years after the war, displaced and dispossessed residents hunted wildlife. By the early 2000s, the elephant population had crashed by more than 75 percent, while successive aerial counts found that buffalo, hippo, wildebeest and zebra numbers were hovering in the single or double digits.

Yet none of these animal populations disappeared completely. Since 2004, wildlife in Gorongosa have rebounded to 80 percent of their total pre-war abundance. Park staff, the Mozambican government and the nonprofit Gorongosa Restoration Project have worked with neighboring communities to nurture the remnant animal populations by suppressing illegal hunting and creating educational and employment opportunities for villagers within the park.

“Our results show that the case of Gorongosa could be general,” said Pringle, who serves on the board of the Gorongosa Project. “Gorongosa is as close as you can come to wiping out a whole fauna without extinguishing it, and even there we’re seeing that we can rehabilitate wildlife populations and regrow a functional ecosystem. That suggests that the other high-conflict sites in our study can, at least in principle, also be rehabilitated.”

Pringle and Daskin emphasized in their paper that wildlife recovery rests in the hands of local people. “I would love to see conservation and humanitarian organizations collaborate on post-conflict relief work,” Pringle said. “Long-term recovery hinges on the health and hopefulness of the people, and healthy environments catalyze human health and hope. It’s a positive-feedback loop.”

When people have a personal and economic stake in a thriving ecosystem, they embrace protective behaviors such as preventing poaching and monitoring wildlife, Possingham said. “This publication confirms the philosophy behind that approach,” he said.

“In any area where large-mammal protection is a concern, one has to get the people-side of the conservation initiative sorted — establishing alternative livelihoods, law and order, education, anti-corruption, etc. — at the same time as taking habitat-protection and anti-poaching actions on the ground,” he said. “If you don’t tackle the ultimate drivers such as a breakdown of civil society, then taking action on the ground and investing in park management might not work.”

The paper, “Warfare and wildlife declines in Africa’s protected areas,” was published online by Nature on Jan. 10. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant nos. DEB-1501306, DEB-1355122 and DEB-1457697) and the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Grand Challenges program (project title: “Ecosystem Spatial Pattern and Development Opportunities in African Rangelands”).

Story Source:

Materials provided by Princeton University. Author: Morgan Kelly.

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The proposal for the park’s creation was jointly made by the Office Guinéen des Parcs et Reserves (OGuiPar) and the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF), and followed an extensive inventory in 2012 of all protected areas of the country including the province of the Foutah-Djallon. This confirmed that Guinea has in the region of 17,000 chimpanzees, by far the largest population in West Africa. However, many of these populations are small and isolated. The area of the Moyen-Bafing, overlapping with the prefectures of Tougué, Koubia, Dinguiraye, Dabola and Mamou, encompasses seven classified forests with what now constitutes the largest continuous population of this critically endangered sub-species in West Africa, and one of the largest on the African continent.

The Director-General of the OGuiPar, Colonel Mamady Keita said: “It is a great day for nature conservation in Guinea. The creation of a national park will contribute to the protection of this important sub-species, while allowing our Government to come closer to our objectives, as outlined during the 10th Conference of the Parties of the Biodiversity Convention held in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010. ”

The proposal to create the park resulted from a long process during which detailed data on the distribution and abundance of animal sub-species living in the area, as well as data on the demography and the socio-economy of the local communities, were gathered. An initial stakeholder engagement process was conducted to inform the communities about the benefits and potential implications of this project on their livelihood. In addition, national workshops were held to inform the national and local partners about the project, who then validated the provisional park limits.

Professor Christophe Boesch, President of the WCF said: “When I first arrived in the Moyen-Bafing in 2014, I was impressed by the high number of chimpanzee nests we found along the gallery forests. Then, coming out of a ravine, we heard numerous chimpanzee alarm calls and saw 24 individuals slowly moving away from a pool, while looking back at us. Once at the pool, we noticed they had been fishing for algae deep in the water with twigs they had left behind – a skilled solution to feed, while at the same time covering their need for water during the dry season. This tool use is unique to the chimpanzees in the Moyen-Bafing.”

The WCF engaged with two mining companies, Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée (CBG) and Guinea Alumina Corporation (GAC), a subsidiary of Emirates Global Aluminium, about using the Moyen-Bafing area as an offset to compensate for the residual impacts of their mining operations on chimpanzees. CBG has received financing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, and IFC is considering an investment in Guinea Alumina Corporations’ Sangaredi bauxite mine. Both companies are committed to implementing conservation activities that will result in a net gain in the chimpanzee population proportional to the numbers impacted in the mining concession. By working with CBG, GAC and IFC, the Moyen-Bafing national park will now receive the financial resources it requires for its activities to protect and rehabilitate the forest environment. This is an excellent example of a collaboration between the Government, the private sector and an NGO to achieve the long-termSet featured image protection of a globally important site for the West African chimpanzee.

The Minister of Environment, Eaux et Forêts, Madame Aissiatou Balde said that:  “This park represents a unique chance to contribute to the protection of the West African chimpanzee and, with specific actions, restore the vital function of water in the environment, contributing to an improvement in the living conditions of the communities directly affected by the decrease of rainfall and uncontrolled deforestation.” The next steps are that OGuiPar and WCF will conduct a series of studies including an in-depth socio-economic impact assessment and carry out a process of informed consultation and participation with communities throughout the set-up phase of the park to ensure full understanding of the trade-offs and potential livelihood changes. This will culminate in the official Decret for the national park in approximately two years with the broad support of the communities.

Christophe Boesch added that: “After the disappearance of so many chimpanzees over these past few years in West Africa, we all hope that this important move by the Government of Guinea will signal the start of specific measures to sustainably protect the environment in the region for the good of the chimpanzees and the local human populations who are everywhere being confronted by the negative consequences of climate change.”

“The creation of this national park, comes after many years of effort by the IFC and the WCF as well as CBG and GAC,” said Rene Fontaine, GAC’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment Delivery Manager. “Founding the national park is just the start of a long and worthy journey towards protecting the habitat of the Western chimpanzee, so that this globally-important sub-species can increase in number and thrive in Guinea.”

For more information:

Colonel Mamady Keita, DG de l’OguiPar, Conakry, Guinea. Tel: + 224 62 25 46 290, Email: sayba58@gmail.com

Prof. Dr. Christophe Boesch, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and President of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. Tel: + 49 341 35 50 200, email: boesch@eva.mpg.de, wcf@wildchimps.org

Websites:

Ministère de l’Environnement, des Eaux et Forêts Guinée

Wild Chimpanzee Foundation

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