Protected areas are not for mining: Interview with WWF’s Nadège Nzoyem

Filed 55m ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: SIJM MIGS · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Nadège Nzoyem, WWF's regional director for the Congo Basin, argues in this interview that protected areas should actually be off-limits to mining, a position complicated by findings from Earth Insight that oil, gas and mining concessions overlap tens of millions of hectares of protected land across the tropics examined.

She cites WWF's Living Planet Report 2026, which found an average 80% decline in monitored African wildlife populations between 1970 and 2022, while pointing to bright spots in WWF-supported landscapes like Lobéké National Park and Dzanga-Sangha. She attributes most shortfalls to a global biodiversity finance gap approaching $942 billion, of which Central Africa has mobilized under 5%.

The interview arrives ahead of the COP17 biodiversity summit in Armenia, where the 30x30 conservation target will face scrutiny over whether governments are backing boundary-drawing with actual enforcement.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Nzoyem isn't wrong that a park with a mining concession stamped through the middle of it is just a line on a map. But it's worth noticing who's doing the talking here: an organization describing its own landscapes as the hopeful exception while the broader numbers it cites keep sliding the other way. Funding gaps are real, but so is the habit of groups grading their own corners of a failing system as the proof the system can work.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0