- Guinea’s government is assessing the potential impacts of a mining project in the Nimba Mountains, in a biodiversity hotspot that has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site while being threatened by mining.
- U.S. mining company Ivanhoe Atlantic recently submitted an environmental impact assessment for an iron ore mine at a site that is the only known home of two unique bat species, as well as critically endangered chimpanzees and threatened toads and frogs.
- Conservationists say open-pit mining in this ecologically sensitive region could spell extinction for Lamotte’s roundleaf bat and the orange-furred Nimba Mountain bat if their forest habitat is disturbed for mine infrastructure.
In 2018, researchers from Bat Conservation International, Cameroon’s University of Maroua and the American Museum of Natural History entered abandoned mining tunnels in Guinea’s Nimba Mountains as part of an environmental and social impact assessment for an iron ore project. They wanted to better understand the habitat and behavior of the critically endangered Lamotte’s roundleaf bat (Hipposideros lamottei) in order to mitigate the negative impacts of a proposed mining project. As they were prowling in the horizontal shafts of mines left behind in the 1970s and ’80s, they encountered a distinctive and distinctly unknown-to-science bat species.
It was joy for the scientists, and potential disaster for U.S. miner Ivanhoe Atlantic (formerly HPX), which is seeking to develop an open-pit iron ore mine amid the rich biodiversity of the Nimba Mountains, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Residents of the villages around Nimba had previously reported sightings of a bat with bright orange fur here in the mountains, around 1,400 meters (4,600 feet) above sea level, but the 2018 survey was the first formal record of the bat. The scientists searching the abandoned mine shafts were able to trap, examine and release just two individuals on two occasions, one male and one female.
They also recorded echolocation at a total of five adits, the access tunnels to the old mines, that matched the vocalizations of the bat they’ve formally named Myotis nimbaensis. In the 2021 paper announcing the bat’s identification, the researchers explained its relationship to other members of the insect-eating Myotis genus, and gave it a species name honoring the mountain range it calls home.
These bats may pose a fresh problem for Ivanhoe’s troubled plans to develop the Kon Kweni iron ore project. The company recently submitted a new environmental impact assessment to the Guinean government for review, but conservationists say the planned mine could lead to the extinction of both the newly described Nimba Mountain bat and Lamotte’s roundleaf bat.
A mine and associated transport infrastructure here would also cause devastating harm to critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), and the world’s only true viviparous toad (Nimbaphrynoides occidentalis) — meaning it gives birth to live toadlets rather than tadpoles — as well as the Mount Nimba reed frog (Hyperolius nimbae), according to the Amphibian Survival Alliance.
“There is this huge clash: it’s a real mineral-rich area, but also a world-renowned biodiversity hotspot,” Jon Flanders, one of the biologists who probed the old mine tunnels seven years ago, told Mongabay by phone.
The Nimba range is considered one of the world’s most biodiversity-dense areas. The forests and savannas that make up this UNESCO World Heritage Site straddle a 175-square-kilometer core conservation area of Guinea, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire — formally Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve — and host dozens of endemic species.
“The species of bat that we were most interested in to start with was the Lamotte’s roundleaf bat — critically endangered, only known from a few sites in recent years, only found on the [Nimba] mountains,” said Flanders, the director of endangered species interventions at Bat Conservation International.
Lamotte’s roundleaf is a small brown-blackish insectivore named for the round shape of its nose leaf, the leaflike feature on some bats’ noses that’s thought to help them with their echolocation navigation. These bats act as a natural pest control and fertilizer within their ecosystem.
Flanders said that due to the species’ constrained echolocation — the animals’ ability to navigate by sound influences how far they can fly away from their roost — any changes to the habitat around the abandoned mine tunnels they’re sheltering in would have significant impact on them.
Paradoxically, the tunnels adopted as roosts by the roundleaf and Nimba Mountain bats could be destroyed by the new development that Ivanhoe Atlantic is pursuing.
Neither species has ever been recorded by science outside the Nimba World Heritage Site, listed by UNESCO in 1981 for extraordinary levels of biodiversity, as indicated by the high number of endemic species found here. Nimba’s status was downgraded to “in danger” 11 years later when the Guinean government requested to UNESCO that some 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) be cut out from the Guinean section of the World Heritage Site for the Kon Kweni project.
The stakes are high. Nimba’s concentration of threatened and endemic species occurs in a small area that has already been scarred by large-scale mining on the Liberian side of the Nimba range. Satellite imagery shows extensive damage caused by the Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company (LAMCO), which extracted iron ore there during the second half of the 20th century.
“The destruction from the mine is visible from space,” said Genevieve Campbell, a primatologist who leads the great apes section of the Primate Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, and works with the wildlife conservation organization Re:wild.
Environmentalists warn that resuming large-scale mining around Mount Nimba could set off cascading impacts affecting both wildlife and local communities, as forest is cleared or fragmented by mine infrastructure, rivers and streams are polluted, and noise and increased presence of mine workers and others disturb sensitive areas.
For the rare bats that inhabit this landscape, the impacts will include the disruption of their flight lines and foraging corridors, as well as the destruction of the habitat that creates the food — insects — these bats feed on, Flanders said.
The consequences could extend beyond the bats themselves, he said: “This is beyond bats. The number of rare and endangered species inhabiting this mountain range is truly remarkable – and that doesn’t even factor in its importance as a water source for the region. One would hope the government would start to reach out to experts for their opinion on this.”
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has cautioned Guinea’s government on several occasions over its actions toward Nimba. Most recently, in June 2025, the committee urged Guinea to assess the mine project in its entirety — across all phases of its projected life — to fully account for the cumulative potential impacts of the Kon Kweni project on the site.
“We have a lot of constraints there, because there are several mountains,” Karim Samoura, secretary-general of Guinea’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, told Mongabay. “For the part that is close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site, our constraints for exploitation are very, very high.”
Samoura told Mongabay that environmental authorization for the project by his ministry is still a long way off.
Guinea has asked the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment (NCEA), an independent body that advises governments and organizations on environmental and strategic impact assessments, to review Ivanhoe Atlantic’s terms of reference and scoping report for the planned mining project last year. The commission identified significant gaps, most notably that the assessment covers only the first phase of mining, while excluding phases two and three and mine closure.
According to Flanders, until around 2020, the Guinean company Société des Mines de Fer de Guinée (SMFG), which used to be owned by a consortium made up of Australia’s BHP Billiton, U.S.-based Newmont Mining and France’s Orano, was cooperating actively with experts like Bat Conservation International. When it was taken over by U.S. billionaire Robert Friesland’s High Power Exploration (HPX) in 2019, which later changed its name to Ivanhoe Atlantic, that communication abruptly stopped.
Flanders said very few biologists and experts who have studied the rare and threatened species of this area were consulted, raising questions about the quality of the environmental and social impact assessment that Ivanhoe Atlantic recently submitted.
“What scares us is just the lack of transparency and the speed in which this new process is being done,” Flanders said.
Growing concerns over the project’s impact led a group of international organizations, including Re:wild, Bat Conservation International, Amphibian Survival Alliance and Fauna & Flora, to write a letter to the Guinean government calling for a moratorium on mining in or affecting the World Heritage Site.
Campbell said the Guinean government has not yet responded to the letter. She said the ongoing environmental assessment is being rushed, and a moratorium would offer the government an opportunity to consult experts who were excluded from the assessment and more thoroughly evaluate the project in line with international environmental standards and mine in a sustainable way.
“This project has been in exploration for many, many years and they are having trouble getting funding because it is in such a sensitive place,” she said.
The environment ministry’s Samoura told Mongabay that the assessment is currently being reviewed, and will be sent to UNESCO, the IUCN, the NCEA and other independent experts for comment. He said the government is far from issuing any kind of environmental authorization. Campbell said the Guinean government has invited them to a meeting to discuss the assessment early next year, adding there’s no specific date yet.
Abdoulaye Sylla contributed to this report from Conakry.
Banner image: Researchers trapped two Nimba Mountain bats in abandoned mine shafts in the Nimba Mountains during a survey in 2018. Image courtesy of Jon Flanders.
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Citation:
Simmons, N. B., Flanders, J., Bakwo Fils, E. M., Parker, G., Suter, J. D., Bamba, S., … Frick, W. F. (2021). A new dichromatic species of Myotis (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) from the Nimba Mountains, Guinea. American Museum Novitates, 2020(3963), 1-40. doi:10.1206/3963.1
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