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Nouabale-Ndoki National Park Celebrates 25 Years

Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, managed in partnership by WCS, Republic of Congo, and local communities, is arguably the most advanced and demonstrably successful conservation models of its kind in Africa. It's a stunning protected area and World Heritage Site that features pristine lowland rainforest safeguarding some of Central Africa’s best-known wildlife. Along with our local and international partners, we're celebrating the park's 25th anniversary.

Over that time, the Congolese Ministry of Forestry Economy (MEF) and WCS have worked together to ensure the protection of this natural sanctuary. In 2014, the Congolese Government decided to delegate the management of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park to a private foundation, the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation (NNF), a partnership between the government of Congo and WCS.

The partnership began in the late 1980s, when conservationists from these two organizations first began exploring the area, documenting its wildlife and habitat. In 1993, the government of Congo saw the importance of the Ndoki forest for biodiversity conservation and created the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park.

On June 18, the government of the Republic of Congo recognized 25 years of effective conservation of wildlife within the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park (NNNP), which covers 1,621 square miles in the north of the country.

WCS helped establish this national park in 1993, after our staff walked and canoed many hundreds of miles through the forest in the late 1980s. At that time, the area was designated for logging by the Ministry of Water and Forest. However, timber companies were not interested in the concession, because the swampy nature of the area made access difficult and expensive. These same swamps also make the area unattractive to local people, though they continued to live, hunt and fish in the surrounding upland forests.

During the surveys conducted in the 1980s, no human settlements were found within what is now the park. The only signs of human presence were charred palm kernels found in river beds.Through carbon-dating, the kernels were shown to be 2300 to 900 years old. Why people left the area around 900 years ago remains unknown even to the story keepers of the BaNgombe, BaBenzele and Sangha-Sangha Indigenous Peoples. We know that people rarely if ever ventured into what is now the park, because much of the wildlife showed a naïve reaction to humans. When Jane Goodall visited the area, she reported that the chimpanzees were completely unafraid of people and allowed her and others to approach them, something that took her over a year to achieve with chimpanzees in Gombe Tanzania.

When the park was established in 1993 there were no people living within its borders and no one was physically displaced to create the park. The nearest human settlements to the park remain 20 km west and 50 km east of the park. The Indigenous Peoples of Bomassa-Bon Coin in the west and Makao in the east continue to hunt, gather, and fish in the forests, rivers and lakes within their traditional territories that have always been outside of the NNNP. These lands and waters have been theirs for hundreds if not thousands of years and they continue to provide food, clothing, and shelter to their families and remain essential to their cultural sense of self. At times, families in Congo travel across the park to visit relatives in the Central African Republic and WCS continues to ensure their safe transit.

In northern Congo, as across the planet, respectful engagement with Indigenous Peoples and local communities is a core feature of our approach to conservation, because we have shared interests in the conservation of the wildlife and natural resources that are essential to our local partners’ cultural identity and are central to our mission of saving wildlife in wild places.

Recently released survey results show that elephant and great ape numbers remain stable not only in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park but also on its periphery, showing the effectiveness of the landscape approach to protecting wildlife.