I first started working in Africa in late 1999, when I joined the Wildlife Conservation Society team that was managing the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. The Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park lies at the heart of one of the richest and most biologically intact tropical forest ecosystems in Africa. Located in the heart of Central Africa, the area is home to a diverse range of globally threatened mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and plants – forest elephants, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, and bongo antelope are just some of the species of large mammals which roam the forests. The national park also boasts old growth forests containing mahoganies and other tree species which are many hundreds of years old. It is one of the world’s few remaining remote, undisturbed wilderness areas.
For the last 25 years the Congolese Ministry of Forestry Economy (MEF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have worked together to ensure the protection of this natural sanctuary. This partnership began in the early 1990s, when conservationists from the two organisations first began exploring the area, documenting its wildlife and habitat; in 1993, the government of Congo recognised the importance of the area for biodiversity conservation with the creation of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park.
This partnership has continued to prosper over the past 25 years, allowing the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to remain one of the world’s truly wild protected areas. National park staff have succeeded in conserving the area’s wildlife during a period in which much of Central Africa has come under threat from the activities of illegal loggers, poachers and other groups who wish to plunder the region’s natural resources.
Elephant poaching in particular has remained an ever-present threat to the wildlife in the area, and is often driven by factors that lie far beyond the boundaries of the protected area. The most important amongst these is the global level of demand for ivory, which in itself influences the price, driving up prices when demand is high. In the early 1990s, politics also played a role, as the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) implemented a worldwide ban on the trafficking of ivory in 1989.
This coincided with the launch of conservation activities in Nouabalé-Ndoki. Once the local people of Bomassa and Makao had given their support to conservation, and anti-poaching activities were underway, elephant poaching in the area was almost completely eradicated, with only very occasional cases being reported.
However, the global financial crisis in the late 2000s, coupled with a growing demand for ivory from Asia, changed the dynamics of elephant poaching across Central Africa. Prices for raw ivory in local towns such as Ouesso and Impfondo increased significantly, and a previously economically marginal activity was suddenly very lucrative. The looming crisis was further fuelled in the area surrounding the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park by the dramatic increases in road access that took place around the same period; logging activities were focused in the area bordering the Ndoki river from 2006 until 2010, and more recently the eastern bank of the Goualougo river has been logged, meaning that a network of access roads and paths now straddles almost the entire southern boundary of the national park.
Faced with this ‘perfect storm’ of road access and economics, the management team knew that they had to come up with an equally innovative response. Such a change arrived in Congo when the government decided to delegate the management of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to a private foundation, the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation (NNF). The NNF was created October 2014, and is a partnership between the government of Congo and WCS. Its primary goal is to ensure the sustainable management and financing of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, with a Board of Directors setting the overall strategy for the Foundation and a Park Management Unit responsible for implementing activities at site-level.
The development of such a transparent framework for all major strategic and management decisions has ensured a high degree of accountability for all stakeholders, and has facilitated a notable increase in the effectiveness of the on-the-ground conservation activities. This in turn has fostered greater confidence on the part of donors, and as a result there has been a significant increase in funding for the park management unit over the time that the new management framework has been in place. The Foundation also provides representatives of local communities with a voice in management decisions, and community development now lies at the heart of the Foundation operations, with one of the five sections of the project management unit focused on that area.
Above all, the creation of the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation has allowed park management to professionalize the national park operations, developing management and business plans, securing significant new investment, and increasing staffing and infrastructure to a level that is appropriate to successfully manage a national park in the modern age. Under the new management framework there has been a significant increase in the park’s ranger force, while an intensive training regime has ensured that they possess the skills necessary to undertake their work efficiently. With increased coverage, manpower, and the use of real-time communications technology, rangers are now much better able to protect the area.
Behind the scenes, extensive support systems have been put in place to oversee areas such as logistics, purchasing, vehicle management and maintenance, and adminstration, ensuring that the park operations run seamlessly. Various monitoring systems have been introduced to ensure that the national park objectives are being achieved. Field-based research teams have developed innovative remote monitoring systems such as camera traps and acoustic recorders, while all ranger units are monitoring using bespoke software. Landscape surveys allow park managers to gain an accurate estimate of population numbers for large-bodied mammals every five years.
These skills are regularly put to the test, with ecoguards now encountering poachers in the forest on a frequent basis. Most recently, an incident in the southern buffer zone of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park resulted in the arrest of four people and the seizure of a number of illegal items, including
