- A 4 meter high perimeter wall was built alongside a village bordering Ngezi Forest Reserve as construction to a luxury resort estate has started on Zanzibar’s Pemba island.
- A dirt road cutting through the protected forest has been widened to facilitate the transport of goods.
- Researchers warn that no environmental planning has been done and that animal and plant species could go extinct if the development goes ahead.
Earlier this year, workers built a concrete perimeter wall for a planned resort on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. There’s scant public information about the Mantuli development, but the wall is just a few hundred meters west of the 1,440-hectare (3,558-acre) Ngezi-Vumawimbi Nature Forest Reserve, where scientists have identified more than 80 new species of plants in recent years — some of which they fear would be driven to extinction by the development.
According to a noticeboard near the forest and plans previously published on the website of South Africa-based Acoarch Architects, the luxury resort’s chalets, pools, fitness center and coffee lounge will stretch along 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) of Vumawimbi Beach, denying residents of nearby Makangale village access to the sea. Some of the online content has since been removed, and the architecture firm didn’t respond to Mongabay’s inquiries.
Tim Caro is an evolutionary ecologist who has conducted research in the area and is a member of U.K.-registered charity Friends of Ngezi, which works with communities and promotes conservation of the forest. He said around a third of Makangale residents are involved in fishing, launching their boats from Vumawimbi Beach, which is also a popular recreational spot for island residents.
“According to weekly reports we receive from members of the community, the perimeter wall blocks Makangale villagers’ access to their fishing sites, to the graves of their ancestors, to their football field, and to paths to other villages,” a representative of Friends of Ngezi told Mongabay via email.
Ngezi Forest Reserve is home to many endemic plant and animal species, including the Pemba palm (Dypsis pembana), Pemba flying fox (Pteropus voeltzkowi), and Watson’s reed frog (Hyperolius watsonae) and the Pemba featherleg damselfly (Platycnemis pembipes), both critically endangered species known only from Pemba.
Viola Clausnitzer, an entomologist and member of the Dragonfly Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay that many of the plants and animals present in the reserve have not yet been studied.
“Especially for invertebrates we still have hardly any knowledge. Based on vertebrates and Odonata [dragonflies and damselflies] we can assume that the percentage of endemic species is even higher in invertebrates,” she told Mongabay by email.
She said she expects roadwork and the resort construction in the forest will mean an unknown number of species will face extinction before they can even be described for science.
In September 2025, Clausnitzer was among 14 international scientists who published a letter calling on the government of Zanzibar, the semiautonomous Tanzanian archipelago that includes Pemba, to consider relocating the resort elsewhere to protect the reserve.
Ngezi is probably the last remaining large area of evergreen rainforest on the East African coast, botanist Michael Burkart told Mongabay via phone. “It’s truly something very unique, and also only very incompletely explored.”
Burkart studies Sansevieria, a genus of plants found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly East Africa, with a few species occurring in Madagascar, Saudi Arabia, India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. He said Tanzania is believed to host the greatest variety of species of these plants.
“We found a dozen scientifically undescribed Sansevieria species in Pemba, which is absolutely overwhelming because the island is flat and not that big,” Burkart said, adding these species are unlikely to exist anywhere else.
No construction has yet taken place inside the new perimeter wall. But once it starts, Burkart told Mongabay, he and his colleagues are prepared to launch a rescue mission, moving endemic plants from the forest to a botanical garden in order to preserve them — ideally on the main island, at Botanic Garden Zanzibar.
Caro told Mongabay that the area designated for development is home to a recently discovered stand of intsia trees (Intsia bijuga): “These trees are old growth, 100 years old, and they are found nowhere else on the African continent.”
While the signboard near the forest suggests the high forest — the more inland part of the forest, at the center of the reserve — would not be directly affected by the resort, a narrow dirt road connecting the eastern and the western sides of northern Pemba was widened and tarred in late 2025. Clausnitzer said this newly paved road will disturb wildlife in the forest. “The road, which used to be a tunnel through Ngezi, is now a barrier for many species.”
According to Caro, the road is meant to help with the transport of goods and facilitate access to the emerging hotels along the island’s western coast. Burkart said there’s little doubt that the road serves the Mantuli development, which has its main construction yard just south of Makangale village.
Mongabay approached the Tanzanian Department of Forestry and the Department of Agriculture for comment. Neither had responded by the time this story was published.
Clausnitzer said she can’t see how construction at the chosen site is compatible with preserving the spectacular conservation value of Ngezi: “You cannot mitigate the damage, because the construction will destroy the last remaining habitats of species already on the rim of extinction.”
Banner image: What used to be a dirt road through the heart of the Ngezi Forest Nature Reserve has recently been widened to facilitate development. Image courtesy of Viola Clausnitzer.
Growing conservation and community: Interview with Ngezi reserve chief
Citation:
Burkart, M., Kavula, K. A., Constantine, I. K., Mollel, N. P., Piniely, L. N., Sikawa, R. A., & Yinger, B. R. (2025). Sansevieria bangalalana sp. nov. (Asparagales, Asparagaceae), close to extinction in the wild, and five other narrowly endemic and threatened species of Sansevieria from Tanzania previously unknown to science. European Journal of Taxonomy, 1026(1), 65-106. doi:10.5852/ejt.2025.1026.3113
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