NIGERIA’S PARKS UNDER PRESSURE. ....Inside the struggle to save the country’s forests, wildlife and last great wildernesses

The forest is still standing. But for how long?

Somewhere beyond the highways, towns and expanding settlements of Nigeria are landscapes that most Nigerians rarely see.

There are forests where chimpanzees still move through the canopy. Wetlands where migratory birds arrive. Savannahs where antelopes once moved in herds. Mountains, rivers and ancient forest corridors where some of the country's most threatened species continue to survive.

These places are Nigeria's national parks.

Together, they represent some of the country's most important remaining protected ecosystems. The National Park Service says the seven parks cover more than 22,000 square kilometres, stretching across very different ecological zones. Its mandate is not merely to keep animals inside fenced boundaries. It is responsible for preserving vegetation and wildlife, protecting endangered species and habitats, maintaining important wetlands and watersheds, and conserving representative ecosystems for future generations.

But protecting a forest on paper and protecting it on the ground are two different things.

Across Nigeria's protected areas, conservation is confronted by an overlapping set of pressures: poaching, illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, illegal mining, forest fires, agricultural expansion, settlement and human-wildlife conflict.

Behind each problem is another story — poverty, demand for timber and bushmeat, international trafficking networks, weak enforcement, insecurity, competing claims to land and, increasingly, the question of whether the institutions responsible for conservation have enough resources to do the job.

The result is a national conservation challenge that reaches far beyond the boundaries of the parks.

A country of seven parks

Nigeria's national park system began in 1991 with five parks: Gashaka-Gumti, Kainji Lake, Cross River, Old Oyo and Chad Basin.

Yankari Game Reserve became a national park in 1992, while Kamuku and Okomu were added in 1999. But Yankari was subsequently delisted in 2006. That leaves seven national parks under the present federal system.

Today, the parks include:

Gashaka-Gumti National Park — Adamawa and Taraba

Kainji Lake National Park — Kwara and Niger

Cross River National Park — Cross River

Chad Basin National Park — Borno and Yobe

Old Oyo National Park — Oyo

Kamuku National Park — Kaduna

Okomu National Park — Edo

The official NPS figures put the combined conservation area at approximately 22,206 square kilometres.

 Gashaka-Gumti is the largest at 6,731 sq km, followed by Kainji Lake at 5,382 sq km and Cross River at 4,000 sq km. Okomu, at just over 202 sq km, is the smallest of the seven.

Geographically, the parks are as diverse as Nigeria itself.

From the wetlands of the Chad Basin to the rainforest of Cross River and Okomu, and from the savannah landscapes of Kainji and Old Oyo to the mountains of Gashaka-Gumti, they form a network of habitats that cannot simply be replaced once lost.

That is why what happens inside them matters.

THE FIRST BATTLE: POACHING

When wildlife becomes a commodity

Poaching is perhaps the most visible threat to wildlife conservation.

The National Park Service itself identifies poaching as one of the problems undermining conservation and describes it as a criminal activity requiring cooperation among government agencies, communities and other stakeholders.

But poaching is not simply the story of a hunter entering a forest with a gun.

Wildlife crime can involve the entire chain — the person who kills or captures an animal, the intermediary who buys it, the transporter who moves it, the trader who sells it and, in some cases, international networks that move wildlife products across borders.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's assessment of Nigeria's wildlife crime landscape identifies rosewood, elephant ivory and pangolin scales among the major commodities associated with wildlife crime supply chains involving Nigeria.

The pangolin illustrates the complexity.

An animal that most Nigerians may never encounter alive can become valuable once removed from its habitat and converted into a commodity. The same basic logic applies to ivory, skins, timber and other wildlife products.

The forest therefore becomes the beginning of a supply chain.

And once demand exists outside the forest, conservation officers are fighting more than individual poachers. They are confronting an economic system.

THE SECOND BATTLE: THE TREES

When a forest disappears one truck at a time

Wildlife conservation is often associated with elephants, chimpanzees, antelopes and other animals.

But a park can lose its ecological value long before its last animal disappears.

Cut down enough trees and the habitat changes.

Illegal logging is consequently not simply a forestry problem. It is a biodiversity problem.

Nigeria's National Strategy to Combat Wildlife and Forest Crime identifies high-value timber, including rosewood species, as a major part of the country's wildlife and forest crime challenge. The strategy notes that Nigeria is part of international supply chains involving high-value timber.

UNODC's more recent analysis also highlights the complexity of timber regulation in Nigeria, where forestry regulation largely operates at state level while timber can move through national and international trade channels. It notes that determining whether timber reaching ports was legally harvested can be difficult.

This creates a conservation problem with several layers.

A tree may be standing in a protected area.

Somebody cuts it.

The timber leaves the forest.

It enters a transport chain.

It may eventually reach a market far removed from the place where the tree stood.

By the time the wood becomes furniture or another finished product, the ecological cost of its removal may have disappeared from sight.

OKOMU: A CASE STUDY IN WHAT PARTNERSHIPS CAN DO

Okomu National Park offers a useful example of both the scale of the challenge and the possibility of improvement.

In March 2025, it was reported that the park's conservator said illegal logging and poaching had declined following collaboration between the National Park Service and the Africa Nature Investors Foundation.

According to the conservator, ranger training and the recruitment of volunteer rangers had strengthened security, while illegal logging had been reduced significantly. These are claims by the park management and should be independently assessed over time through enforcement data, wildlife monitoring and community-level evidence.

The lesson is important.

Conservation does not necessarily succeed through government action alone.

Where government institutions, conservation organisations, communities and other partners combine resources and expertise, the capacity to patrol and protect difficult terrain can improve.

But partnerships also raise another question:

What happens when the project ends?

A sustainable conservation system cannot depend permanently on temporary interventions.

The ultimate test is whether Nigeria can build institutions capable of protecting its parks consistently — regardless of whether an external organisation is present.

GASHAKA-GUMTI: THE BIGGEST PARK, THE BIGGEST TEST

High in the mountains and forests of northeastern Nigeria lies Gashaka-Gumti, the country's largest national park.

UNESCO's tentative-list documentation describes it as approximately 5,907 square kilometres in its demarcated area and identifies it as one of the largest protected areas in West Africa. The park contains diverse ecosystems ranging from montane highlands to lowland environments.

But size is both an asset and a challenge.

A huge protected area requires people, vehicles, communication systems, equipment, intelligence and money.

And conservation does not stop at drawing a boundary on a map.

UNESCO's documentation notes that Gashaka-Gumti contains recognised enclaves with a population of approximately 15,000 people, with management plans being developed in coordination with communities. The same documentation records historical pressures including poaching for the urban bushmeat market, illegal logging, artisanal mining and forest fires associated with illegal cattle grazing.

That is the complicated reality of conservation.

The park is protected.

But people also live around and, in some places, within landscapes connected to it.

The question becomes how conservation can protect ecosystems while recognising the legitimate social and economic needs of communities.

WHEN THE BOUNDARY MEETS THE FARM

The encroachment dilemma

A line on a government map may look definitive.

On the ground, it can be anything but.

As populations grow and demand for farmland increases, pressure on land surrounding protected areas can intensify. Farmers need land. Pastoralists need grazing routes. Communities need roads, water and livelihoods.

Conservation authorities, meanwhile, are expected to maintain protected boundaries.

This creates a conflict that cannot be solved simply by describing everyone outside the boundary as an encroacher.

Research published in GeoJournal in 2024 examined human-wildlife coexistence around Okomu and Cross River National Parks. Based on surveys of eight communities involving 203 households around Cross River and 198 around Okomu, the study identified community benefits, compensation for crop damage and conflict-mitigation measures as important elements in improving coexistence.

That finding points toward an important shift in conservation thinking.

If communities bear the cost of living beside wildlife, they must have a reason to see wildlife conservation as beneficial.

Otherwise, the park can become perceived as a restriction rather than a shared national asset.

THE WILDLIFE TRAFFICKING CONNECTION

Nigeria's parks are not isolated from the global wildlife market

One of the biggest misconceptions about wildlife crime is that it ends at the edge of the forest.

It does not.

Nigeria has been identified as an important country in international wildlife trafficking networks.

The country's National Strategy to Combat Wildlife and Forest Crime 2022–2026 specifically identifies Nigeria's role in international supply chains involving rosewood, ivory and pangolin scales.

A 2024 progress report on Nigeria's National Ivory Action Plan submitted to CITES also described efforts involving the Nigeria Customs Service and other law-enforcement bodies, including the deployment of scanners at major ports and training aimed at improving identification and detection of wildlife contraband. The report said investigations had identified trafficking routes involving wildlife products entering northeastern Nigeria from parts of Central Africa.

This changes the way the conservation problem should be understood.

The ranger in a national park is one part of the enforcement chain.

Customs officers are another.

Police and other law-enforcement agencies are another.

Investigators, prosecutors, courts, border officials and international partners are also part of the system.

If one link fails, the illegal commodity may continue moving.

THE MONEY QUESTION

Can conservation survive on inadequate funding?

Perhaps the most fundamental question facing the National Park Service is financial.

Protecting thousands of square kilometres of difficult terrain is expensive.

Rangers require salaries, training, accommodation, transport, communications equipment, protective gear and field support.

Parks require roads, visitor facilities, research, wildlife monitoring and community programmes.

Vehicles require fuel and maintenance.

Technology requires investment.

And all of this has to continue year after year.

During a January 2025 budget defence, the National Park Service reported 2024 expenditure of approximately ₦4.33 billion on personnel, ₦1.03 billion on overheads and ₦1.95 billion on capital projects, while reporting that only about ₦633.46 million of the capital allocation had been disbursed and utilised at that point. The Service also sought a ₦5.01 billion intervention for 2025 to address funding gaps, insecurity and illegal mining.

Those figures provide an important window into the financial pressures surrounding conservation.

But a budget figure alone does not tell the whole story.

But:

How much is allocated to each park?

How much is actually released?

How much reaches field operations?

How many rangers are deployed to each park?

What is the ranger-to-area ratio?

How many patrol vehicles are operational?

How frequently are patrols conducted?

How much is spent on intelligence and wildlife monitoring?

What proportion of the budget is personnel compared with field protection?

How much revenue comes from tourism?

How much funding comes from development partners?

What happens to internally generated revenue?

These are questions that should be answered park by park.

THE RANGERS ON THE FRONT LINE

Every conservation policy eventually reaches the forest floor.

That is where the ranger enters the story.

The ranger may spend hours or days moving through difficult terrain. The job can involve confronting armed poachers, monitoring illegal activity, protecting wildlife, gathering intelligence and responding to threats far from conventional public services.

In Nigeria's more insecure regions, conservation and physical security can become inseparable.

The National Park Service's own recent activities show that ranger capacity remains an institutional priority. Its headquarters has highlighted ranger activities and, in 2026, reported World Ranger Day activities involving the Service and the Federal Ministry of Environment.

But a conservation system cannot be judged only by ceremonies.

The harder questions are operational:

Are rangers sufficiently equipped?

Are they adequately trained?

Are they insured?

Do they have reliable communications?

Can they summon security support when confronted by armed criminals?

Do they have enough vehicles and fuel?

Are their patrols supported by intelligence?

And perhaps most importantly: what happens after a suspected wildlife criminal is arrested?

THE LAW ENFORCEMENT GAP

Wildlife crime is not solved by arrest alone.

An effective conservation justice system requires investigation, evidence gathering, prosecution and appropriate adjudication.

The problem becomes more complicated when wildlife trafficking crosses state or national boundaries.

UNODC's work on wildlife and forest crime emphasises that the crime can involve multiple stages — sourcing, transportation, processing, sale and international movement.

For Nigeria, that means conservation enforcement needs to operate across institutional boundaries.

The National Park Service cannot do everything alone.

Customs, police, other security agencies, environmental authorities, prosecutors and courts all have roles to play.

The question is therefore not simply how many arrests have been made.

It is:

How many cases result in successful prosecution and conviction?

And:

What happens to the money generated by the illegal trade?

Following the money may be just as important as following the animal.

THE MINING PROBLEM

Illegal mining introduces another dimension.

Mining can remove vegetation, disturb soil, pollute waterways and fragment habitats.

The National Park Service has identified illegal mining among the challenges requiring attention, while its headquarters has also highlighted the formation of a National Forestry Task Force intended to address illegal mining in Nigerian parks and other protected areas.

For conservationists, the problem is straightforward: once a forest is cleared or a watercourse is damaged, restoration can take years — and in some cases the original ecosystem may never return in exactly the same form.

For people seeking livelihoods, however, mining can provide income.

Again, conservation meets economics.

The policy challenge is therefore larger than simply sending enforcement teams into forests.

It requires alternatives.

WHAT IS THE CONDITION OF THE PARKS?

The phrase "national park" can create the impression of a finished product.

It is not.

A protected area is a living system.

Its condition changes according to rainfall, fire, wildlife populations, human activity, infrastructure, disease, climate pressures and the effectiveness of management.

Nigeria's own Park Service describes the parks as ecosystems that support ecological processes and life-support systems.

But to understand whether they are actually healthy, the country needs consistent monitoring.

That means reliable data on:

Wildlife populations.

How many elephants, chimpanzees, antelopes, primates and other key species remain?

Forest cover.

How much forest has been lost, degraded or fragmented?

Illegal activity.

How many incidents of poaching, logging, mining and encroachment are recorded each year?

Enforcement.

How many arrests occur, and what proportion leads to prosecution?

Communities.

How many households depend directly on resources around protected areas?

Tourism.

How many visitors come to each park, and how much revenue is generated?

Without these numbers, it becomes difficult for citizens to measure whether conservation policies are working.

A DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING AT THE PARKS

There is another way to understand Nigeria's national parks.

Not as isolated forests.

But as economic and ecological infrastructure.

Forests store carbon.

Wetlands regulate water.

Healthy ecosystems support agriculture and livelihoods.

Wildlife can support tourism.

Protected landscapes preserve genetic diversity.

Rivers and watersheds provide services far beyond park boundaries.

The National Park Service itself describes its mission in terms of conserving Nigeria's natural heritage while providing benefits and enjoyment for present and future generations.

That means conservation should not be treated solely as an expenditure.

It can also be understood as an investment.

The question is how Nigeria captures that value without destroying the resource that creates it.

TOURISM: THE UNTAPPED POSSIBILITY

A functioning national park can generate value without killing an animal or cutting down a tree.

Visitors can pay for accommodation, guiding, transportation, food and park access.

Local communities can provide services.

Young people can find employment as guides, hospitality workers, drivers, researchers and conservation assistants.

Craft producers and small businesses can benefit.

But tourism depends on something fundamental:

the park must be safe, accessible and attractive.

This makes security and conservation inseparable from economic development.

The National Park Service's own strategic vision identifies ecotourism as part of the potential role of the national park system in Nigeria's economic diversification.

The challenge is turning that ambition into a sustainable model.

THE COMMUNITY QUESTION

The future of Nigeria's parks may ultimately be decided not only in Abuja, but in the villages surrounding them.

Communities are often the first to know when strangers enter a forest.

They may know where animals move.

They may know where illegal loggers operate.

They may know which routes are used to transport bushmeat.

But communities can also be the people most affected when conservation rules restrict access to land and natural resources.

This creates a delicate relationship.

Conservation works better when communities see tangible benefits.

The 2024 study of Okomu and Cross River provides evidence supporting approaches involving community benefits, compensation and conflict mitigation.

The policy question is therefore not simply:

How do we keep people out of the park?

It is:

How do we make the survival of the park valuable to the people who live beside it?

SEVEN PARKS, SEVEN STORIES

Each of Nigeria's parks deserves its own investigation.

Gashaka-Gumti

The country's largest national park and a landscape of mountains, forests and diverse habitats. Its history also illustrates the complexity of managing protected areas containing human enclaves and confronting poaching, illegal logging, mining and fire.

Cross River

One of Nigeria's major rainforest strongholds. Here, the conservation story intersects strongly with human-wildlife coexistence and the pressure placed on communities living around protected landscapes.

Okomu

A relatively small but ecologically important rainforest park where recent collaboration with conservation partners has been credited by park management with reducing illegal logging and poaching.

Kainji Lake

A vast protected landscape spanning Kwara and Niger, comprising the Borgu and Zugurma sectors. Its scale makes effective monitoring and protection a major management task.

Old Oyo

A protected landscape in southwestern Nigeria where conservation intersects with agriculture, settlements, heritage and the pressures of a densely populated region.

Kamuku

Located in Kaduna State, the park sits within a part of Nigeria where conservation and wider security concerns can overlap.

Chad Basin

Spread across Borno and Yobe, the park represents a particularly important northern wetland and savannah conservation landscape, while operating within a region facing severe environmental and security pressures.

Together, these parks form a national system.

But they do not face identical problems.

That is why a one-size-fits-all conservation strategy is unlikely to be sufficient.

THE YANKARI QUESTION

There is also an important lesson in the history of Yankari.

Yankari remains one of Nigeria's best-known wildlife destinations, but it is no longer administered as one of the seven federal national parks.

The National Park Service records that Yankari was delisted in 2006 following a request by the Bauchi State Government.

Its status is a useful reminder that Nigeria's protected-area landscape is not static.

Boundaries, governance structures and institutional responsibilities can change.

THE BIGGER QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF CONSERVATION DOES NIGERIA WANT?

Nigeria has laws.

It has parks.

It has rangers.

It has conservation organisations.

It has international partners.

It has wildlife crime strategies.

It has customs officers trained to identify wildlife products.

It has communities with generations of knowledge about their environments.

And yet the pressures continue.

The central issue may therefore not be whether Nigeria understands the importance of conservation.

It is whether the country is prepared to consistently invest in it.

That investment is not only financial.

It means political attention.

It means credible enforcement.

It means reliable data.

It means functioning institutions.

It means community participation.

It means making wildlife crime sufficiently difficult and sufficiently risky for trafficking networks.

It means ensuring that the ranger standing at the edge of a forest has the equipment and institutional support needed to do the job.

And it means measuring success honestly.

WHAT SHOULD BE MEASURED?

A national conservation scorecard could begin with ten questions:

How much money was budgeted for each park?

How much was actually released?

How many operational rangers protect each park?

How many kilometres of patrols were conducted annually?

How many poaching, logging and mining incidents were recorded?

How many suspects were arrested and prosecuted?

How many wildlife-trafficking cases resulted in convictions?

What has happened to wildlife populations over the past decade?

How much forest cover has each park gained or lost?

How much economic value is being generated for neighbouring communities?

Such data would transform the national conversation.

Instead of asking whether Nigeria is "protecting its parks", citizens could see evidence of what protection actually means.

THE FOREST CANNOT SPEAK

A national park does not vote.

It does not lobby.

It does not appear before a parliamentary committee.

A chimpanzee cannot submit a petition against the destruction of its habitat.

A tree cannot complain when a chainsaw enters the forest.

A wetland cannot campaign for its survival.

That responsibility belongs to people.

To governments.

To communities.

To conservationists.

To journalists.

And to citizens.

Nigeria's national parks are more than tourist destinations. They are repositories of biological wealth, ecological systems and national heritage.

But protected status alone does not guarantee survival.

The future of the country's wildlife will depend on what happens between the law on paper and the reality on the ground.

If rangers are properly equipped, communities are treated as partners, trafficking networks are investigated, illegal logging is confronted, mining is controlled, budgets are transparently deployed and wildlife populations are scientifically monitored, the parks can remain living landscapes rather than names on government maps.

The alternative is quieter.

A forest becomes thinner.

An animal becomes rarer.

A species disappears from one location.

A stream becomes polluted.

A traditional route through the forest becomes a road for trucks carrying timber.

Then one day, people discover that what they thought was permanent was never permanent at all.

The real conservation question for Nigeria is therefore not simply how many national parks it has. It is whether the country can keep them alive. And that question cannot be answered from Abuja alone. It must be answered in the forests.

Aviashima Toom, an Environmental Journalist, aviashimtoom@gmail.com

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