Desperate and harrowing tales have been written about Sierra Leone’s 11 years of bloody civil war.
This west African country is bottom of the world’s poverty league and visitors are struck, the Observer said on Sunday, by the squalor, the paucity of infrastructure and absence of paved roads.
But change is afoot. Peace has reigned for six years now; the country is regarded as a safe and attractive holiday destination and Bradt Guides is about to publish the first travel guide devoted to Sierra Leone.
The country is indeed teeming with destinations to lure the tourist. But more than that, it boasts a wealth of wildlife, some of it rare. And within its borders lies a large part of what remains of the Upper Guinea Forest, once a huge expanse of rainforest straddling five countries and covering all of Sierra Leone. This is the Gola Forest.
Just three months ago, Sierra Leone’s new president, Ernest Bai Koroma, backed plans to make this 75,000-hectare rainforest a national park. That should mean comprehensive protection for more than 270 species of bird including the striking Gola malimbe, for 2,000 different plants and for leopards, chimps, elephants and pygmy hippos.
But the benefits of promised safeguards do not stop there. Protection should also mean that logging and diamond mining is stopped. These damaging activities should also cease in the seven other sites for which national park status is pledged.
The president’s announcement came as world leaders met in Bali, Indonesia, for talks designed to cut global carbon emissions and to find a successor to the Kyoto climate change deal of 2001.
On the table was a suggestion that saving rather than felling trees could help tackle global warming.
Protection for rainforest in Sierra Leone means huge amounts of carbon will not be released into the atmosphere because both trees and soil store this polluting gas. It can take tens, if not hundreds of years to repay that carbon deficit from products, like biofuels, produced from the damaged land. Some biofuels never make their repayments because the carbon damage of their manufacture is so great.
The RSPB has today written to the Observer to highlight its support and funding for the Gola Forest project. Local communities are benefiting, from new job opportunities and compensation for the loss of logging and mining rights.
Sierra Leone is about to show the rest of the world how forest conservation can help combat climate change without its people losing out.
Read more on the RSPB's work in Gola here
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It's fantastic news that Graham Wynne's contribution to nature conservation has been recognised