In eastern Sierra Leone, straddling the border of Liberia, lies Gola Rainforest National Park, one of the last remaining intact tracts of the tropical Upper Guinean forests in West Africa. Towering trees with massive buttress roots create a dense, emerald-hued canopy where monkeys hoot, malimbes chatter and hornbills flutter between the branches with their high-pitched honks and impressive wingspans. Along the park’s fringes, 122 communities own small patches of the jungle within the four-kilometer-wide (2.5-mile) buffer zone. In the past, people here relied on these community forests to harvest timber and other forest produce, hunt for bushmeat and grow staple crops. In the 1900s, logging and mining intensified in the region’s forests, including the area that would become Gola Rainforest National Park. People cut down large swaths of trees in the buffer zone to grow cash crops like oil palm and cacao, from which chocolate is made. Poaching and encroachment in the forest increased during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, further threatening the rainforest and its wildlife. According to a 2017 geospatial analysis published by Purdue University in the U.S., such activities led to massive deforestation, with the Gola community forests losing more than 4% of their tree cover annually between 1991 and 2016. Gola Rainforest National Park sits on Sierra Leone’s border with Liberia and protects one of the country’s last large tracts of primary forest. In 2013, a carbon credit project was launched in the Gola rainforest to stymie deforestation and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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