Forest loss calls for urgent action

International scientists have called for urgent action to conserve the Guinean forest of West Africa, saying it is one of the world's top five biodiversity hot spots. "The goal is to reach a consensus among government officials, researchers, protected area managers and private conservation groups to take specific steps to halt or reverse the decline in West Africa," the Environmental News Service (ENS) reported on Friday. The West African forest, which covers several countries in the region, had already fallen prey to agricultural development and logging, according to the scientists, who met in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on 12 and 13 September. The scientists hailed from various African countries, as well Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Portugal and the United States. "When I started 22 years ago to work in the Tai forest, the last 100 km were through a vegetation green tunnel," ENS quoted Christophe Boesch, of the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, as saying. "Today you have to drive all the way to the national park limits to see the first patch of forest. The trend has been the same throughout West African forest regions," Boesch added. As a result of destruction of West African forest cover, one of the four subspecies of the common chimpanzee had disappeared from forests in Benin, the Gambia and Togo, and was almost extinct in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea Bissau and Senegal, the scientists said. The meeting in Abidjan was sponsored by the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science and the West Africa Program at Conservation International, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Great Ape Survival Project and the Primate Action Fund. It was co-organised by the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation and Kyoto University.