West Africa's rainforests are often overlooked by conservationists and reporters, while the Amazon, Indonesia, and Congo Basin are super-served by journalistic and nonprofit scrutiny. But these forests are home to a unique panoply of endangered species, including western chimpanzees which are only found there, forest elephants, pygmy hippos, and the flying lizard.
Yet they are on the way out. An assessment for the Pulitzer Center by satellite mapping company Space Intelligence projects that at current rates, rainforests in Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone will disappear completely in 68, 73, and 86 years respectively. Even these projections may be too optimistic, however, because a wave of new mining and logging permits are being issued inside forest reserves in all three countries. Politicians are bending the rules and watering down legal protections in what amounts to a systematic and deliberate erosion of forest safeguards.
If this continues unchallenged, it could dramatically bring forward the extinction-point of forests in all three countries. This is one of the most critical - and underreported - forest stories in the world. If these reservoirs of biodiversity survive, however, they may one day be able to regrow across West Africa's equatorial belt, just as Costa Rican rainforests have recovered.
