Esther and Rio, two orphaned baby chimpanzees, clung tenderly to their caregiver’s chest at a sanctuary inside one of Sierra Leone’s flagship national parks, where unprecedented deforestation and illegal urban encroachment pose a risk to both primates and humans.

The young apes, who arrived at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary when they were just three months old, listened with wide eyes as other chimps screeched and played nearby.

The park’s dense vegetation, stifling heat and the metallic fever pitch of reverberating insects served as a backdrop for the country’s spectacular biodiversity, which includes several protected species.

While the sanctuary rehabilitates orphaned Western chimpanzees, it is also a leading site for wildlife research and conservation education programmes. It is extremely popular with tourists — but its keepers have defiantly kept it closed since late May.

The protest is meant to spur the government into action over the rapid environmental degradation taking place in the national park where it is located.

The deterioration does not just affect the chimps, experts say, but also inhabitants of the wider region including the nearby capital of Freetown, home to some two million people.

Situated just 15 kilometres (nine miles) from the overcrowded metropolis, the sanctuary lies inside the country’s Western Area Peninsula National Park (WAP-NP).

Mining, logging and urban development have claimed vast swaths of the verdant park. Meanwhile, poachers place traps dangerously close to the terrain for the sanctuary’s Western chimpanzees, which are listed as “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Since 2000, Sierra Leone has lost 39 percent of its forest cover, according to monitoring site Global Forest Watch.

And of the 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of forest in WAP-NP, almost a third has been ruined or severely degraded since 2012.

“The last two (or) three years we have seen an increase of chimpanzees rescued, simply because you have a lot of degradation outside where wild populations are,” sanctuary director Bala Amarasekaran, who founded the facility in 1995, told AFP.

– Freetown threatened –

The dangers of deforestation extend well beyond chimpanzees, however, and also threaten humans, particularly those in Freetown whose water supply is controlled by the Guma Dam, located inside WAP-NP.

The enormous structure sits about six kilometres south of the chimpanzee sanctuary and is surrounded by a green, old-growth tropical rainforest.

In the valley below the dam, urbanization is highly visible. The sprawl causes runoff which contains extra silt and sediment that collects in the dam’s reservoir and creates sanitation issues, especially in the long rainy season.

“This settlement did not exist three years ago,” Maada Kpenge, managing director of the Guma Valley Water Company, told AFP.

But “every year a few houses get added to it” he said, stating that the squatting residents claim to own the land legitimately.

“Every year we lose thousands of hectares of the forest,” he said, adding that in 10 or 15 years’ time there will be hardly any forest left.

Without the trees to help regulate the water cycle and capture and retain water, the dam’s level will additionally drop drastically.

Under such circumstances, “living in Freetown would be a challenge, almost impossible,” Kpenge said.

The government faults opaque and corrupt land allocation practices carried out in the past, while highlighting new, stricter laws on land ownership that it says are helping.

But activists and experts say the new regulations are not being adequately enforced.

– Ranger patrol –

AFP was able to follow a team of underequipped rangers who are attempting to enforce the rules and keep deforestation at bay.

“We have so many challenges in the national park and so many (illegal) activities,” Alpha Mara, commander of the forest guards within the National Protected Area Authority (NPAA), told AFP.

On the day AFP spoke with Mara, he and about 20 other rangers packed into one pickup truck to check on six sites located in the park and its buffer zone.

Except for one man with a machete, the guards lacked weapons or protective gear to fend off traffickers and squatters.

To tear down illicitly constructed structures or remove beams demarcating land that had been claimed illegally, the men used their bare hands.

At one site, the ranger with a machete slashed the sheet metal of shacks.

Suddenly, a terrified young woman emerged from one, holding a crying baby.

The woman, Famata Turay, explained that her husband worked guarding the piece of land and was paid by a wealthy person living abroad who claimed it as his own.

“This is illegal construction,” ranger Ibrahim Kamara told her as he wrote up a report on the site.

Turay said defiantly that she had been unaware.

“I feel bad because I don’t have any other place to sleep,” she told AFP after the rangers left, sobbing as she looked at her half-destroyed shack.

– Institutional failure –

Because of deforestation, already extreme temperatures could become unbearable for the majority of residents in Freetown and the surrounding region, experts warn.

Deforestation also exacerbates soil erosion, which is already dire during the country’s rainy season, as evidenced by Africa’s deadliest ever landslide, which struck in Freetown in 2017 and killed 1,141 people.

Back at the Tacugama sanctuary, its founder Amarasekaran was appalled at what he saw as the government’s institutional failure.

If someone is breaking the law, “there should be penalties, there should be prosecution (but) that is not happening,” he said.

The orphan chimps often arrive malnourished and disabled. Some additionally suffer from gunshot or machete wounds while others were caught by poachers then kept as pets in villages.

Even after orphans such as Esther and Rio are rehabilitated, they must still spend the rest of their lives living on the sanctuary’s dozens of hectares of protected wilderness, alongside some 120 other chimps.

The apes have made Tacugama the country’s “number one ecotourism destination”, Amarasekaran said.

“You cannot be boasting about having a world-class sanctuary and we are still failing to protect it,” he said.

© Agence France-Presse