For two years, a volunteer organization in eastern Sierra Leone worked to encourage residents of Kenema district to plant trees and switch to more climate-resilient crops. Sierra Leone Environment Matter’s 50 members aimed to protect both residents’ farming livelihoods, faltering in the face of changing weather, and the Kambui Hills Forest Reserve which has been degraded by illicit logging and mining. In a phone interview, SLEM’s founder, John Kamara, told Mongabay that biodiversity and natural resources that residents depend on in the Kambui Hills reserve have been damaged by deforestation and illegal mining. The hills are vital for local agriculture, forestry, tourism, water conservation and climate regulation, and they also hold cultural significance for local communities. Kambui Hills is a commercial timber reserve that also serves as a buffer zone protecting the nearby Gola reserve. The landscape around the forest reserve is mature secondary rainforest, a mixture of evergreen and semi-deciduous trees at higher elevations, giving way to bush and thickets — and farms — on the lower plains. The reserve proper consists of the 20,000-hectare (49,000-acre) Kambui North and a smaller 880-hectare (2,175-acre) Kambui South portion, with the main road running between them to the town of Kenema, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) east of the reserve. People from surrounding areas make various use of the forest, gathering firewood and producing charcoal, illicit mining for gold and diamonds, and hunting. Many species have been documented in this region of Sierra Leone — colobus monkeys and critically endangered western chimpanzees (Pan…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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