Villagers step up to halt Sierra Leone deforestation

Deep inside a Sierra Leone national park, a mother of seven was about to set dozens of tree trunks ablaze to make charcoal. Producing the cheap fuel in this way is illegal in the protected rainforest near the capital of a country highly vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. But Aminata Sankoh, a widow who said she had no other choice for making a living, defiantly shrugged off a stern warning from a group of villagers who monitor the forests as part of a groundbreaking grassroots initiative. "You are saying you are not affected by this deforestation, that there will be tree planting — but it will affect your own great grandchildren!" chided group leader Caesar Senesie.

The extent of the deforestation in the humid tropical forest and what remains of the primary forest is clear as far as the eye can see. Some has been taken over for marijuana plantations — Sierra Leone is battling drug problems — and land grabbing is also rife to satisfy demographic pressures.

Nearly a third, or 5,600 hectares (13,837 acres) of the forest within the Western Area Peninsula National Park has been lost or severely degraded since 2012.

Last year alone "intensive deforestation" led to the loss of 715 hectares, or the equivalent of 1,330 football pitches, according to the World Food Programme. UNESCO says the area is home to between 80 and 90 per cent of Sierra Leone's biodiversity. But charcoal is the only way for many Sierra Leoneans to cook in the face of power cuts and soaring energy prices. Finding the illicit charcoal producing sites means venturing deep into the forest by road and on foot, but an AFP team managed to visit the area.

Groups of men fended off exhaustion as they carried out backbreaking work in stifling 35-degree Celsius (95-Fahrenheit) heat, stacking up tree trunks covered with stones.

Near Sankoh, the widowed mother, a mound several metres wide began to smoke. The worn-out 45-year-old said her husband died four years ago and to feed her children and pay for their schooling, she took a job breaking stones on construction sites. But two years ago, she made a decision.

"I used to break stone... but I am not doing it any longer because I was struggling a lot. So I decided to come to the forest and do charcoal burning," she said. Faced with the failures in protecting the forest as well as land seizures, units comprising 40 villagers have been set up.

"Even at night, when we have a fire break out, I call my guys, we move straight away," Senesie, the group leader, said.

"We, the community, are the solution to protect the forest," he added. Funded by the Global Environment Facility, the initiative was launched by the Environmental Foundation for Africa (EFA) NGO, with support from the government and the United Nations Development Programme.

People carry out illegal activities in the national park "because they can and believe that they will get away with it every time", Tommy Garnett, EFA founder and executive director, said. He blamed poverty, ignorance and greed for driving the deforestation. "This situation is destroying our natural heritage at an alarming rate," warned Garnett, who for 30 years has been involved in conservation projects in Sierra Leone and other west African countries.

Sierra Leone is the 11th most vulnerable nation to the impact of climate change out of 191 countries ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative.

Faced with the inefficiency and the alleged corruption of some forest rangers — who, under-equipped and underpaid, sometimes turn a blind eye — campaigners are banking on involving the worst hit local communities. Garnett said that paying villagers an incentive of $60 a month to make daily patrols and collect evidence had shed more light on what was happening in the forest than a decade of official patrols.

EFA has replanted 103,000 trees in the past year, with the goal of an additional 500,000 by 2028. A few kilometres (miles) away, another unit of villagers from the "Mile 13" settlement were doing their bit under Sulaiman Barrie, who angrily complained of recent forest fires in the vicinity.

"This was never the Sierra Leone we knew... This was never the Mile 13 I knew when I was just a boy," an emotional and exhausted Barrie said, smoke from the fires still rising above the mountains behind him. "We are standing now in a protected area... where we have all sorts of animals," he said.

The community must "step up and protect the forest", he insisted. The government has also taken steps, Tamba Dauda, director of surveys within the lands, housing and country planning ministry, said. "We are quite aware of the massive deforestation that is ongoing," he said, highlighting the establishment of a land and environmental crime unit within the police to pursue perpetrators. Despite such efforts, Joseph Rahall, founder of the NGO Green Scenery, warned that the forest's very survival was at stake. "We are beyond the emergency level," he said. "If we don't manage the Western Area Peninsula very well, in 10 to 15 years there will be no forest."