When conservationists set up treetop cameras in Côte d’Ivoire’s Tanoé-Ehy forest, they hoped to get video of the elusive Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus waldroni), a critically endangered species…
SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…
MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…
Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…
Tropical rainforests have an outsized role in the world. Of the Earth’s ecosystems, rainforests support the largest variety of plants and animal species, house the majority of indigenous groups still…
Eating crops is a risky business for chimpanzees, who run the risk of injury or death if they are caught by farmers protecting their livelihoods. But new research shows that…
In January 2017, researchers noticed two ill chimpanzees in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire. The baby and adolescent West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) were coughing, breathing hard, and…
In a video, a group of young Ghanian men stride out into the bush, carrying long sticks over their shoulders. Dogs trail alongside them. When they come across a burrow,…
In the 1960s, there were an estimated 1 million wild chimpanzees in West Africa. Today, there are fewer than 300,000. With habitat loss, hunting and wildlife trafficking taking their toll,…
The coronavirus has rocked the foundations of societies across the globe. Since the virus originated in wildlife, there has been public outcry demanding the closure wildlife meat markets. Neglected thus…
IJARE, Nigeria — The silver blade slides through the log laid over a metal bed beneath the sawmill machine. When the careful routine ends, one of the two operators pulls…
As she peered into the collection chamber of her harp trap, Iroro Tanshi instinctively knew she had caught something peculiar. It was small, with large ears, and a button-like patch…
Eating chocolate shouldn’t mean fueling environmental and social destruction. But, as a stream of news stories and reports make abundantly clear, too often it does. Cocoa production in Ghana and Ivory Coast – the world’s biggest cocoa producers…
IKPAKO, Nigeria — Dark stumps of half-charred trees, dry cassava stems and dead tree trunks cover a large swath of land on the way to Ikpako, a small farming enclave…
Nigeria's Ekiti state government has moved to establish a conservation area within the Ise Forest Reserve, an important step toward protecting the habitat of the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti).…
Law enforcement officials around the world have seized more than 200 tonnes of pangolin scales since 2016, more than half of it linked to Nigeria, a new report has found.…
APOI, Nigeria — It’s sunset in the small Niger Delta village of Apoi. The town crier's bell rings out over tilted electricity poles and small bungalows. “The epiene people are…
Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo shut its doors to tourists this week in an attempt to protect its great apes from possibly being infected by the…
The European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR), which came into force in 2013, prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested timber on EU markets. EUTR implementation relies on a due diligence process…
By supporting programs aimed at securing the economic well-being of communities in Nigeria's Cross River state, the European Union hopes to help protect Cross River gorillas (Gorilla gorilla diehli), Africa's…
Around 1,000 vultures have been found dead in Guinea-Bissau in the last two weeks, believed to have been poisoned. The birds, almost all critically endangered hooded vultures (Necrosyrtes monachus) were…
Billions of dollars in loans issued to resource-rich countries could saddle them with insurmountable debt, according to a new report from the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), a nonprofit organization…
ACCRA — “Beginning now, the full-scale exploitation of Ghanaian bauxite resources will commence,” Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said last June. “I am satisfied by what I have been…
Fish are an indispensable source of food and protein for communities in many African countries. But the growth in industrial-scale fishing fleets around the continent has put that resource and…
Toward the end of 2014, Tanya Rosen, a former New York-based international lawyer, found herself being followed by a car while walking back to her apartment in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.…
2019 closed out a "lost decade" for the world's tropical forests, with surging deforestation from Brazil to the Congo Basin, environmental policy roll-backs, assaults on environmental defenders, abandoned conservation commitments,…
A final effort to find Miss Waldron's red colobus is under way in the forests of southeastern Côte d'Ivoire. Should it fail, this monkey will next year become the first…
Every year, billions of fish — almost one-fifth of the world’s annual wild catch — are dried, pressed and ground into oil and meal. The majority of this material is…
Protected lands in the tropics are often managed to curtail poaching, creating a refuge for vulnerable wildlife that face risks of extinction. However, a new study in West Africa’s largest…
COBIANA, Guinea Bissau – He remembers the first time he heard the voice of Mama Djombo. Albino Moreira Mendes was sleeping in his bed in Cobiana, a small town in…
