GABON
Supporting community protection of biocultural giants in the Ogooué-Ivindo region of north-eastern Gabon
In 2022, The LEAF Charity embarked on a partnership with Association Ebyeng-Edzuameniène (A2E) and Association N’donga Massaha (ANM), two communities in Gabon’s Ogooué-Ivindo region, with the facilitation of the Nsombou Abalghe-Dzal Association (NADA).
Around 90 percent of Gabon is covered by forests, which represent some of the world’s most biodiverse and intact rainforests, making up nearly one fifth of the entire Congo Basin forest. This globally important landscape is home to forest dwelling communities whose lifestyles, livelihoods and histories are intimately tied to the forests that they share with many endangered species, including forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, and pangolins.
These forests also hold a large diversity of little studied old growth trees, including iconic and threatened giants like the Moabi, Kevazingo, and Douka.
These species hold their own cultural importance for local people and support local ecosystems. They are also of global importance to biodiversity conservation and carbon storage.
These globally and bioculturally important forests are threatened by industrial logging (and mining) which increases unsustainable hunting and trade and human-elephant conflict. Community self-determination, sustainable protection and resource use, and locally-led governance and management are essential to the protection and sustainable use of these threatened ecosystems.
A2E established the first Community Forest in all of Gabon – and are visionary in that they do not log their forest but protect and sustainability use it through a variety of initiatives enabling their communal well-being both now and long into the future. Massaha is another visionary community, who have undertaken the historic initiative to establish their unlogged ancestral forest as what is destined to become Gabon’s first Community Protected Area, Ibola Dja Bana Massaha (the reserve of all Massaha’s children).
LEAF’s support will enable these two leading communities to learn and grow from each other in solidarity to protect and restore their ancestral forests through various linked activates:
Reinforcement of the A2E nursery.
Seed collection expeditions in the unlogged forest of Massaha for native, endangered and bioculturally important tree species.
Planting activities of native tree species: the establishment of a biocultural arboretum in Ebyeng-Edzuameniène and the reforestation of Massaha’s ancestral village sites destroyed by industrial logging.
And, research, capacity building, training and educational activities, as required, to support conservation, habitat restoration and related subjects.
