Story by Mongabay
By Mohamed Fofanah
Conservationists mobilize to save Sierra Leone national park and its chimpanzees© Mongabay
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Standing at an altitude of 1,945 meters (6,381 feet), Mount Bintumani is the highest peak of the Loma Mountains, which is the highest mountain range in Sierra Leone, and the tallest peak in West Africa. The area around Mount Bintumani was designated a non-hunting forest reserve in 1952 and became Loma Mountains National Park (LMNP) in 2012.
LMNP covers an area of 33,201 hectares and a medley of ecosystems, from montane tropical forests and grasslands to sub-montane rainforests, shrub savanna and dry forests. These ecosystems support a wide array of wildlife, including around a dozen species of primates such as red colobus (Piliocolobus badius), black and white colobus (Colobus polykomos) and sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atyys). Other threatened animals found in the park include Jentink’s duikers (Cephalophus jentinki), leopards (Panthera padus) and — at lower elevations — forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and pygmy hippopotamuses (Choeropsis liberiensis). Because of their elevation, the Loma Mountains also host a rich bird diversity including many species that do not occur elsewhere in the country — and five that are globally threatened.
But perhaps the park’s most famous denizen is the chimpanzee. LMNP is home to around 1,390 critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), according to a survey in 2019 conducted by Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, a research and conservation organization that began as a rehabilitation center for orphaned chimpanzees.
Disappearing habitat, few alternatives
“Sierra Leone hosts the third largest chimpanzee population in West Africa, with more than half of these chimpanzees living in non-protected, human-degraded areas,” said Rosa Garriga, research manager and outreach consultant at Tacugama, who has studied Sierra Leone’s chimps for decades. “The most common vegetation type in Sierra Leone is increasingly becoming ‘farm-bush,’ the degraded secondary forest that emerges after slash-and-burn agriculture.”
According to satellite data from the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch (GFW), Sierra Leone lost 14% of its primary forests in just 22 years between 2002 and 2023. Even protected areas haven’t been immune, with GFW satellite data indicating LMNP lost more than 6% of its primary forest cover between 2002 and 2024, the vast majority of which happened after 2012. Preliminary GWF data for 2024 show further loss cutting into the western and southern portions of the park.
Bintu Sia Foray-Musa, LMNP park manager who also works for the National Protected Area Authority, affirmed slash-and-burn farming – also called shifting cultivation — as responsible for much of the deforestation in LMNP. She said cattle ranching is also to blame.
“As an authority we are working assiduously to handle these illegal activities of the people, which is destroying the forest,” Foray-Musa told Mongabay, adding that “the problem is pervasive.”
The driving force behind these deforestation activities is poverty, according to local residents and conservationists alike. Most communities near LMNP and other protected areas in the region depend on subsistence agriculture to survive.
“We do not have good roads, there is no infrastructure, no system or structure for livelihood alternatives, we have been neglected by the government, what we have is our land and the forest and nothing else” said Amara Marrah, town chief of Konombaia, one of the municipalities that shares a border with LMNP.
Marrah told Mongabay that, several years ago, government officials erected pillars marking the boundaries of the park and encouraged community members not to farm, hunt or cut down trees within it.
“We agreed but told them that we also needed them to help us with alternative livelihood schemes, mechanized farming tool, fertilizers and social amenities like good roads, schools and hospitals, but the government reneged on these requests,” Marrah said. “As a result, we do not have any alternative but to continue to use our lands [and] enter into the park to fight for our survival.”
Fatmata Marrah, a farmer and another Konombaia community leader (and no relation to Amara Marrah), told Mongabay that she and other farmers have had to encroach into the park in order to find land for subsistence agriculture. She said the community keeps growing and so there is an increasing need for more land to farm.
“We need more arable land to cultivate to get better yield, and because we do not have mechanized tools to till the land or fertilizers to improve the soil quality, most of us had to resort to our old age practice of shifting cultivation, and as a result we do venture into the forest reserve to cut down trees, clear the land and burn to set up our farms,” Fatmata Marrah said. “We have relied on this method of farming for a very long time [in order to cultivate] groundnut, pepper, beans, pineapple and rice.”
In addition to slash-and-burn farming, cattle ranching is also threatening the habitat integrity of LMNP. Mamadou Sowe, a cattle herder from the village of Burumakudor, told Mongabay that he and other herders were forced to go into the park with their cattle because community-owned lands do not offer enough pasture. He said that majority of the people in his community are farmers and that there is a longstanding rift between farmers and herders, with cattle destroying farms and farmers killing cows in retaliation, adding to the pressure to venture into the park.
Fasalie Marrah, the paramount chief of the village of Burumakudor, told Mongabay that cattle herders are responsible for the burning of the forest in LMNP. Marrah said “the cattle herders would lit up the trees and grass in certain areas in the forest and disappear. They do not control the fire; in fact, they want the fire to burn a very large portion of the forest so that fresh and soft grass will sprout in the portion of the land that has been burnt, then they will come with their cows to graze.”
Park authorities say a more recent, but increasing, threat is the illegal drug trade. LMNP’s remoteness and difficult terrain is appealing to marijuana farmers, particularly in the park’s southern portion.
“These marijuana farms are expanding and we do not have the requisite logistics like vehicles to patrol the park or even weapon to confront these marijuana farmers who are doing their business inside of the reserve park,” said Alhaji Jawara, a senior LMNP park ranger. “They slash and burn like other farmers and continue to enter deeper into the reserve park to hide their farms.”
Filling gaps, building hope
Park manager Foray-Musa agreed with Jawara, telling Mongabay that the National Protected Area Authority (NPAA) is responsible for protecting Sierra Leone’s forests, but is stymied by limited funding.
“We lack logistics, there are no vehicles or motorbikes to patrol the forest, there is also limited technological tools to monitor real time deforestation as well as other illegal activities,” Foray-Musa said. “There are also limited forest guards, [and those available] are ill-equipped, untrained and de-motivated. In cases of wildfire which is rampant now, we do not have the technology to know the ignition point so it is very difficult to investigate.”
She acknowledged that the communities around LMNP depend on the forest.
“We know they do not have options even though they know that there are laws prohibiting any activities in the reserve park,” Foray-Musa said. “However, they themselves have been asking government to provide sustainable livelihood alternatives which will take them away from the forest, but these are not forthcoming and as a result they resort to the forest.”
However, there have been strides taken by the National Protected Area Authority to protect LMNP, according to Foray-Musa.
“We will not continue to wait for government funding or else we will do nothing, so we have recently partnered with the European Union to implement a project that caters for the social amenities of the community people living around the borders of LMNP which [began] in September 2024,” she said “This project, unlike others, is actually involving the people themselves to get them to identify their needs, to tell us what they want and what will help them leave the park. They will be in charge of the project and we would only provide supervision.”
Foray-Musa added that NPAA will be assisting the surrounding communities in developing a chiefdom plan that includes conservation and environmental protection components. She said that they have helped form a local organization called the Loma Community Conservation Program.
“This community-based organization is a community-led approach that represents the various communities and also interfaces with their communities and then tell us the needs of their communities and also provides leadership to the process,” she said.
Foray-Musa added that NPAA is also involved in a recently-begun restorative tree-planting project. She said that the first phase is to map out the total degraded areas, which they will then use to guide the reforestation process.
Garriga told Mongabay that Tacugama is also engaging in reforestation in LMNP, as well as other activities aimed at preventing forest loss and illegal human encroachment, by partnering with local and international conservation organizations and agencies.
“In collaboration with the local government and with the support of international organizations like the USFWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] and USFS [U.S. Forest Service],” Garriga said, “we are conducting wildlife research, training rangers and hiring eco-guards, providing law enforcement support, implementing educational programs in schools, promoting alternative livelihoods for 28 communities around the park, massive tree planting in deforested areas around the park, and engaging in many other crucial activities.”
More support needed
Abubakarr Kamara, director of the Climate Change and Information Technology Directorate of the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone told Mongabay that the government must do more to fight deforestation in LMNP and elsewhere by helping people in neighboring communities.
“The government has to respond to the needs of the people in those border communities; they should not just make the prohibitions but should ensure that there are livelihood alternatives for the people in order to get them off the reserve area,” Kamara said. “It should be a holistic plan because the forests are essential in climate change mitigation because they capture atmospheric carbon, and if we are able to reserve our forests and the wildlife in them then the nation as a whole will benefit.”
Mohamed Conteh, head of communications at Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, told Mongabay that government subvention is disbursed on a quarterly basis to run the affairs of the ministry and allocated to the various departments within the ministry. He said that with so many high-priority areas needing funding, several departments are under-resourced as a result.
Conteh said that the ministry has made provisions for district extension units that would provide support to rural communities, but that communities near LMNP have not organized themselves sufficiently to qualify for this support. He added the ministry has also encouraged LMNP communities to farm only in lowland and wetland areas.
“These communities that are crying for government support should only form themselves into cooperatives of at least 25 members in each group and then they will be qualified to apply for direct government support which will come in inputs, like seedlings, pesticides, fertilizers, small grants and mechanized farming tools like tractors,” Conteh said.
Foray-Musa said that one bright note is that NPAA has had success in protecting the chimp populations in the park from hunting. She told Mongabay that surrounding communities have been sensitized about the protection of chimps and that local authorities also are very vigilant in enforcing laws that ban hunting them.
Garriga said chimpanzees are highly adaptable and can weather a certain amount of habitat change, but stressed that this is only true to a certain point. She also has concerns that farmers may retaliate against chimps as both compete for the same areas.
“These factors can exacerbate habitat fragmentation, further restricting the chimpanzees’ ability to move between areas,” Garriga said. “This highlights the critical importance of Tacugama’s ongoing conservation efforts to protect forests like Loma before they are further reduced to a landscape dominated by farm-bush.”
Banner image of a western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) by Aram Kazandjian via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Additional reporting by Morgan Erickson-Davis.
Editor’s Note:This story is powered by Places to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time deforestation alerts, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data. Sign up for GFW’s monthly email updates featuring these stories.
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