Farmers in northern Côte d’Ivoire are full of praise for cashew, the Brazilian nut tree introduced in the 1960s – ironically, it turns out – to combat deforestation. They rhapsodize…
CROSS RIVER NATIONAL PARK, Nigeria — It wasn’t supposed to be this straightforward. For days, we’d crisscrossed rainforest-blanketed mountains, hacked through thorny thickets and corkscrewing lianas, narrowly escaped rockfalls, and…
Peering back over the last 120,000 years, scientists have uncovered where chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) rode out past periods of global change, providing insights into how they might be affected by…
This story won an Excellence in Investigative Reporting award from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) in 2022. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia | 阅读中文版 | 日本語で読む) When Sepri was…
BLACK JOHNSON, Sierra Leone — Seated along the peninsula south of Freetown is the secluded village of Black Johnson. Rainforest covers the hills that rise behind it, home to chimpanzees…
Nigeria’s emergence as a trafficking hub for illegal wildlife appears unhindered by the coronavirus pandemic. Between 2016 and 2019, some 200 metric tons of pangolin scales were seized by law…
Emmanuel Essien was sure he had evidence of illegal fishing on board an industrial trawler operating in the waters off the coast of Ghana. The 28-year-old fisheries observer had video…
Authorities at the Nigeria Customs Service have announced the seizure of 7.1 tons of pangolin scales that smugglers were attempting to ship out of the country. According to customs officials,…
On a recent expedition to the remote forests of Sierra Leone, West Africa, researchers found two species of crabs new to science and rediscovered two species not seen in more…
Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos face a bleak future thanks to a perfect storm of human-driven factors, a recent study shows. The triple whammy of the climate crisis, growing human population,…
Juneteenth marks the date in 1865 where an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were freed, marking the official end of slavery in the Confederacy – two years after the…
The world’s 50 largest financial institutions increased their investments in deforestation-linked commodity companies by more than $8 billion since the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new report has…
Residents of the Gambian coastal town of Sanyang say life has gotten harder since a fishmeal plant set up production in 2017. Growing tensions over unresolved disputes with the factory…
For decades, Indonesia has been blighted by some of the highest levels of deforestation on earth. It also provides more than half the world’s palm oil. The two things are directly related. Palm…
An orange-furred bat, new to science, has been described from the caves and mining tunnels of the Nimba Mountains in Guinea, West Africa. A group of researchers, led by the…
Three men are piling wood on a solitary truck parked along the only the road to Djendo, a small town in eastern Guinea-Bissau. They work in silence, throwing rosewood, a…
Liberia’s Nimba county lies about an eight-hour drive north of the capital, Monrovia. In the dry season, the road leading into the far-flung region kicks up swirling clouds of red…
From the Gulf of Guinea to the mouth of the Senegal River, a sprawling shroud of seaweed is choking coastal ecosystems and the fishing communities that depend on them. Offshore,…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting our closest living relative: the chimpanzee. Chimps are…
The vast tangled mangrove forests that sweep along so many tropical coasts are one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. They also play crucial roles in protecting coastlines from erosion…
Poaching for tusks, horns or other body parts is a well-recognized threat to Africa's wildlife, but the impact of hunting for bushmeat may pose a greater threat. Conservationists in Southern…
Today we take a look at efforts to protect the Cross River gorilla, one of the world’s rarest great ape subspecies, which include a radio program broadcast to nearly 4…
For the past four years Marie-Cresence Ngobo has travelled between the scattered villages bordering the giant oil palm plantations run by Socapalm (Société Camerounaise des Palmeraies), which are located in Cameroon’s rural coastal…
Since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016, 300 companies at risk for contributing to deforestation have received at least $153.9 billion in financing, according to a new analysis…
African Parks Network (APN) recently announced it would formally take over the management of the Benin side of W National Park, which comprises a major portion of the largest intact…
It was late afternoon deep in the dry season in Fatikh, a village in the Sahel region of Senegal. Out on his farm, El Hadj Ndiaye, a distinguished gentleman in…
On March 30, authorities in Nigeria imposed a lockdown on the commercial city of Lagos, neighboring Ogun state, and the capital city Abuja. As COVID-19 spread to all 36 of…
George Mgbang battles to rein in his anger whenever he encounters wire snares, newly cleared farms, empty cartridges, hunting camps, loggers, or shotgun-wielding hunters during his regular patrols in Afi…
Western chimpanzees are the most threatened of the four confirmed chimpanzee subspecies. Conservationists estimate that populations of the western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes versus) declined by 80% between 1990 and 2014.…
There are only about 300 Cross River gorillas left in the world, making them the rarest subspecies of gorilla, or indeed any great ape. But in late June, a camera…
