- Between January and April, farmers in Nigeria’s Cross River state use fire to clear land for planting — fires which sometimes burn out of control, destroying standing crops and neighboring forest.
- Since 2022, bat specialist Iroro Tanshi’s Small Mammal Conservation Organization (SMACON) has worked with five villages near southern Nigeria’s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary to prevent dangerous fires.
- Tanshi’s work with communities around Afi, which is home to critically endangered bats, gorillas and chimpanzees, has now been recognized with the Goldman Environmental Prize.
In the forested highlands of southern Nigeria’s Cross River state, plumes of smoke signal the annual fire season from January to April, when farmers routinely use fire to clear new land for planting cacao, maize and cassava. In five villages near the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, the period is also marked by another signal: the sound of metal gongs announcing weather conditions too risky to set fires.
In Buanchor and four other villages, on days when dangerously dry conditions prevail, town criers fan out with gongs to warn residents not to burn the bush. Since 2022, weather stations set up in each of the communities track temperature, humidity and wind. The data are used to produce a daily alert that’s displayed on a signboard in each village, color-coded green for safe, yellow — when there’s been no rain for two weeks — for caution, and red for high danger.
On high-risk days, 50 trained forest guardians patrol danger zones equipped with water backpacks, GPS, radios, fire boots and motorcycles. Anyone caught setting a fire on a “no-burn” day faces a fine equivalent to between $4 and $14 under a community bylaw.
These fire prevention efforts stem from an unlikely source: In 2016, ecologist and bat specialist Iroro Tanshi witnessed a wildfire that swept from farmland into the 100-square-kilometer (38.6-square-mile) Afi sanctuary, where she was exploring caves that provide roosts for several bat species. She and her team had just discovered the caves harbored the short-tailed roundleaf bat (Hipposideros curtus), last recorded in the early 1970s and thought to have been extirpated in the region.
The Afi mountain forests
Alongside the 640-km² (250-mi²) expanse of the adjacent Okwangwo division of Cross River National Park, Afi is home to critically endangered species including the Cross River gorilla (Gorilla gorilla diehli), the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) and drill monkeys (Mandrillus leucophaeus).
Tanshi recognized fire as the biggest threat to bats and this forest habitat. The organization she co-founded, the Small Mammal Conservation Organization (SMACON), launched the Zero Wildfire Campaign across Buanchor and its sister villages.
Farmers use fire as an efficient method to clear land to farm, with the ash adding nutrients to the soil. But when burns get out of control, they can destroy standing crops and nearby forest, killing or displacing wildlife along with their habitat.
Tanshi told Mongabay she found that farmers were well aware of when conditions made burning dangerous, but with weather patterns in the area changing, they found it increasingly difficult to predict when it will be safe.
“That’s what we brought to communities,” Tanshi said. “We said if you want us to be able to tell you when to burn, given climate change and all that, we can sort of do daily predictions.”
“The group’s approach, primarily the use of controlled (prescribed) burning and community-based management, has clearly minimized forest fire risk and protected biodiversity at Afi. More so, the use of technology and early detection has been a game changer,” Patrick Idy told Mongabay in an email. Idy is a forestry official in neighboring Akwa Ibom state who has followed the organization’s work.
Panacea for Developmental and Infrastructural Challenges for Africa Initiative (PADIC-Africa) is a community development NGO working to protect biodiversity in Cross River State that has collaborated with SMACON in the Buanchor area.
“We relied on SMACON to perform the critical role of building local capacity for fire management, and prevention,” the group’s executive director, Martins Egot, told Mongabay via WhatsApp. “Their expertise, dedication, and strong engagement with the community delivered remarkable results, significantly strengthening grassroots awareness and response to forest fire risks.”
Tanshi’s work with villagers to prevent wildfires is only one side of her efforts to protect the bats at Afi Mountain. The other priority is reducing pressure from hunting. In Cross River, and many other places across Africa, bats are often regarded as creatures of misfortune, but they are also widely eaten.
“The Egyptian fruit bats [Rousettus aegyptiacus] are hunted for food. It’s about the size of my hand when you think about it. So that’s a good chunk of meat there,” Tanshi told Mongabay.
At Afi, hunters pursuing these bats with large nets also catch other bat species that share the same caves, including the smaller, critically endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat. The short-tailed roundleaf is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, and has an estimated global population of fewer than 1,500.
“And I mean, you go to the villages, at least when we started this work, a hunter might come in with about 4,000 bats. Just in one visit,” said Tanshi. “That’s a lot of bats, considering that bats don’t reproduce very fast.”
Recognition for work with community
Tanshi has spent the past decade working with people around Afi — as well as in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea’s Bioko Island — to protect rare bats. The group has also trained locals in rearing cane rats (Thryonomys swinderianus) as a substitute meat to reduce demand for hunting bats.
Tanshi has just been honored as one of this year’s winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize. The prize is awarded annually to six winners, chosen by an international jury from a confidential list of nominees submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals. Tanshi is the fourth Nigerian to win the award.
“By mobilizing grassroots community-led action, Iroro has created a powerful and positive model in which conservation and community well-being are inseparable. The alternate path was all too real,” said John Goldman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.
Tanshi said winning the prize feels incredible. “It’s just beyond words, to be honest. It is a lifetime honor to be recognized by something as prestigious as the Goldman Prize and it means a lot to the work that we do.”
Tanshi and her team continue to document bats’ presence in the area, patiently tracking the rare short-tailed roundleaf to a second location in Cross River state.
“In 2015 we took a photo. I just took a photo and then two years later I was looking through those photos. I was like, this is our bat. So there was suspicion that that bat was in that cave system. So we kept going back there every year. We went there for nine straight years until we could confirm that the bat was there,” she said.
The team is now working with the community and the Cross River government to protect the area from a mining interest before announcing the location.
She told Mongabay that her team’s surveys have confirmed the presence of 14 bat species not previously known in Nigeria, bringing the total to 102. Still more exciting, she said, she’s also found a bat that’s not previously been identified by scientists anywhere.
“We have one we’re also trying to describe that is new to science,” she said.
Since finding H. curtus in Afi in 2016, Tanshi and her team have established partnerships with several local and international organizations to drive conservation projects in the area, including introducing children in the communities to bat conservation and fire prevention through lessons, storytelling, and field visits.
Tanshi said the biggest challenge of preventing and managing fires is cost.
“It’s a very expensive process, even though what we do is cheaper than how people else would do it. If you look at some of the data from other places where people manage fires, it can be very expensive to manage. We’re talking sometimes $100 per hectare [2.47 acres],” she said.
“We have brought it down to about 10 dollars, maybe $7 per hectare because we’re not doing what you call ‘prescribed burns,’ we’re doing risk management. So you manage your risk, reduce, you reduce your risk before you respond.”
Tanshi said the Goldman Prize arrived at the perfect time. SMACON has just launched the Tropical Fire Alliance, a program it says aims to expand the wildfire fire prevention program to other countries.
“It’s just perfect timing to tell that story and get more people to join this fight, to use simple solutions to stop wildfires in small rural areas where resources may not be available and people there might actually feel the effects of climate change so much, but without resources to respond,” she said.
Banner image: Iroro Tanshi and team members during morphometric data collection in Odukpani, Cross River State. Image courtesy of Etinosa Yvonne for the Goldman Environmental Prize.
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