Chief Djahi Bertin raised his glass of wine, half full, and emptied it onto the concrete floor. The splash resembled a hand with fingers splayed outward — palm and digits forming a unified whole. "We are of one mind," he said. The gesture sealed a gathering in this small Ivorian village, where scientists, conservationists and park rangers had come to discuss something close to both hearts and survival: reconnecting a fragmented rainforest that has been vanishing for a century.
Nigré sits in southwestern Côte d'Ivoire at the edge of Taï National Park, a 5,000-square-kilometer expanse that represents the largest intact remnant of Upper Guinean forest left in West Africa. Once, this rainforest stretched unbroken from Liberia eastward through Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to Togo. Today, it is a shadow of itself — Côte d'Ivoire has lost roughly 90 percent of its forest cover over the last century, replaced by rice fields, cassava plots, oil palm plantations and rubber monocultures.
Yet pockets of hope remain. Just four kilometers from Nigré, across the border in Liberia, lies Grebo National Park. The distance between the two protected areas is small enough that conservationists see an opportunity: link them with a corridor of native trees planted on working farmland, creating a patchwork passage where animals can move freely again.
"They are free to move between the two areas," Bertin noted. The animals most likely to benefit include forest elephants and western bongos — large, stripe-patterned antelopes rarely seen by human eyes but recently captured on camera traps operating within Taï. Bongos play a critical role in seed dispersal, making them essential to the forest's natural regeneration.
The project brings together the Ivorian Office of Parks and Reserves, the local NGO Eburny Biodiversity Conservation (EBURCO), and South Africa-based Leadership for Conservation in Africa (LCA). LCA director Michele Menegon has already helped establish a similar agroforestry model in Tanzania's Nguru mountains, where farmers receive annual payments from carbon credits for growing native trees alongside crops. A comparable arrangement is envisioned for Nigré — shifting some land away from rubber toward diverse, climate-smart agriculture.
Christine Kouman, an Ivorian environmental scientist and EBURCO president, has spent years studying the communities between Taï and Liberia. She found willing partners in Nigré and the nearby village of Youkou, but Nigré stands out for its legacy of conservation and a chief whose influence can shift community behavior.
"They are willing to make change," Kouman said. "This is one of the strengths of Nigré; the chief is really involved in conservation action." In return for planting trees, residents hope for complementary projects — poultry farms, fish ponds, pig operations — that can supplement their livelihoods while restoring the land.
For a landscape carved into fragments, four kilometers suddenly feels like a distance worth closing.