
In Madagascar, the August-to-December bushfire season wreaks havoc on the southwest and west of the island.
Dry Forest, a young Malagasy NGO, is attempting an extreme form of reforestation to save the forest in Kirindy Mite National Park.
In addition to the bushfires, the NGO faces many other challenges linked to local poverty.
Ashland is the unexpected home of the country’s only full-service forensic laboratory devoted to tracking illegally transported animals and plants. Now the lab is employing a new strategy to get forensic tools to U.S. ports to stop the illegal timber trade.
In November, a Kenyan court ordered the release of 646 metric tons of Malagasy rosewood (Dalbergia spp.), worth up to $13 million, to a Hong Kong-based company from which it had been seized in 2014 by Kenyan authorities.
Lawyers for the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS), which filed a case against the consignment owners, argued that trade in rosewood was banned under CITES, the international wildlife trade convention; however, the judge in the case disagreed.
Rice, the main food crop of Madagascar, could be hastening the loss of biodiversity in the fourth-largest island of the world, according to two exhaustive studies published in the Science journal December 2, 2022.
The cultivation of rice on the island, especially using shifting agriculture, is causing deforestation and subsequent biodiversity loss, according to the research papers.
The papers also urged that collection and analysis of data on Madagascar’s remarkable biota must continue and accelerate “if we are is to safeguard this unique and highly threatened subset of Earth’s biodiversity”.
Madagascar, classified as a ‘Least Developed Country’ by the United Nations, has been in the throes of upheaval in the past few years.
Vohibola forest is one of the last primary forests standing in eastern Madagascar, and home to the world’s tiniest frogs and other rare and endangered creatures.
For a time, in the quiet imposed by COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Vohibola got a reprieve from some of the difficulties that have long plagued it, including deforestation, fires, and timber and charcoal trafficking.
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