A new study has concluded that the decline in Grauer’s gorillas in a sector of their main stronghold in the Democratic Republic of Congo was the result of the impacts of armed conflict, rather than the presence or absence of Indigenous communities. With the end of the Second Congo War in 2003, gorilla populations in Kahuzi-Biega National Park’s highland sector rose back up, where they’ve remained since one of the latest estimates.
The international group of authors said their analysis challenges two opposing narratives around the Indigenous Batwa people native to the area: on one hand, some conservation authorities view the Batwa as forest destroyers responsible for gorilla decline; on the other, some Indigenous rights activists say the decline occurred because the Batwa were evicted and no longer present to care for the forest.
The situation is more complex than this dichotomy, the researchers told Mongabay.
Kahuzi-Biega National Park used to be home to thousands of Indigenous Batwa people before they were forcibly evicted in the 1970s, with no alternative lands. Today, the highland sector of the park serves as a center for tourism of Grauer’s gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri), a critically endangered subspecies of the eastern gorilla, and the park’s headquarters. In the last several years, Indigenous rights advocates and conservation authorities have debated over the imposition of “fortress conservation” and the Batwa peoples’ role in biodiversity loss.
According to field survey data analyzed for the new study, after the Batwa were removed from the park, gorilla numbers remained stable, within a margin of error, between 223 and 258 in the park’s highland sector. But it was once the genocide in neighboring Rwanda by the ethnic Hutus against the Tutsis began in 1994, followed by the start of the Congo Wars, that this sector’s gorilla numbers went as low as an estimated 130. Once the Second Congo War ended in 2003, the gorilla population began to increase. Estimates in a 2020 survey now put the population in the highland sector back at around 252 individuals (model-based estimate), or even as high as 404 (design-based estimate).
“The major population decline occurred during the 1990s, coinciding with the Rwandan refugee crisis and the onset of armed conflict,” says study co-author Fergus O’Leary Simpson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy, focusing on conservation in the DRC.
The researchers analyzed data already collected in surveys and overlaid them with the timing of the Batwa eviction from the park and other major events. Their conclusion suggested that gorilla population changes in the highland sector occurred “independently from the presence (or absence) of the Batwa in the park.” One survey analyzed by the authors was co-authored by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, which partners with the ICCN, the DRC government’s national protected areas agency, to manage Kahuzi-Biega National Park.
Based on these latest findings, the new study, published in the journal World Development, argues that the competing narratives of the Batwa as either forest destroyers or forest guardians are decontextualized from the complex, messy, and unpredictable socioecological reality in the region, which involves armed conflict, politics, extractive activities, poaching, and illegal charcoal supply chains.
The eviction of the Batwa could have interacted with these factors at play, the authors say, but it’s unlikely to have played a central role.
While there’s some uncertainty around the survey’s gorilla population estimates, Liz Williamson, a primatologist at the University of Stirling. U.K., who isn’t affiliated with the study, says this wouldn’t have changed the conclusions of this paper, which she hails as an important contribution bringing “balance to a highly complex situation.”
Dirck Byler, vice chair of the primate specialist group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, agrees.
“Stories about Indigenous people being either ‘forest destroyers’ or ‘forest guardians’ oversimplify things and miss the bigger picture of how violent resource extraction drives environmental damage,” he tells Mongabay, adding there are multiple factors influencing declines.
How does armed conflict play a role?
Study co-author Mwamibantu Muliri Dubois, a senior researcher in conservation ecology at the Official University of Bukavu in the DRC, points out that armed conflict around the park in the past has been one of major factors that provided powerful actors with the means to prevail over others for access to natural resources.
The researchers attribute the gorilla population decline to the immense pressure on park resources caused by the influx of refugees during the Rwandan genocide and Congo Wars, particularly the demand for timber (for construction and firewood) and animals (for food).
When the Rwandan army dispersed refugee camps during the First Congo War in 1996, many refugees fled through the park. Among them were remnants of the previous Rwandan government’s military and other members of genocidaire militia groups, who established bases inside the park, then extracted resources and became heavily involved in poaching wildlife such as gorillas and elephants.
Simpson says poaching and hunting intensified especially during the Second Congo War, from 1998, as numerous armed groups began using the park as a base of operations and source of natural resources. In part this was because, at various points during the Congo Wars, the park’s eco-guards were also disarmed at the time, making them unable to enforce conservation laws against armed violators, Simpson tells Mongabay.
“During this period, coltan mining became widespread within the park, further exacerbating the situation as thousands of miners now relied on bushmeat to sustain themselves,” he says.
Since the 1990s, estimates of gorilla numbers elsewhere haven’t recovered as suggested in surveys of Kahuzi-Biega National Park’s highland sector.
In 1998, there were approximately 16,900 Grauer’s gorillas in the wild across the subspecies’ range in the eastern DRC. That number plummeted to 3,800 individuals in a 2016 assessment, most of them, an estimated 1,571 to 2,105 individuals, now in Kahuzi-Biega National Park. In the much larger lowland sector of the park, where most of the park’s gorillas reside, there was a mean reduction of 87% in gorilla density between 1994 and 2015. Researchers like Byler attribute this to high levels of poaching, loss of habitat and the deterioration of habitat quality due to issues like mining, roads and the presence of non-state armed groups.
“The status of Grauer’s gorillas is critical,” says Williamson, who co-authored the latest conservation assessment, from 2016, for the IUCN Red List.
The assessment showed Grauer’s gorillas experienced a reduction of 77% of their numbers in a single generation. It warned that if the trend continued, 97% of the entire population could be gone by 2054.
A complex picture
Since the eviction of the Batwa from the protected area, park authorities and the DRC government have, at points, framed the Batwa as forest destroyers. Indigenous rights advocates campaign that this legitimizes fortress conservation, the removal of the Batwa’s rights to land in the park, and acts of violence against them in recent years by park guards and government soldiers.
“Th[is] narrative seeks to reinforce the hegemony of the Congolese state, by naturalizing the park guards and the army as the best defenders of the park who should be given free rein to protect the forest,” the authors of the new study write.
They instead present a more complex picture: it suggests the presence of thousands of Batwa people in the park before their eviction in the 1970s had little impact on gorilla numbers in the highland sector. When the Batwa left the park, the Grauer’s gorilla population more or less stayed the same. The recorded increase between 1978 and 1990 was minimal, the authors say, rising from 223 to 258 individuals, or a difference of 35 individuals.
“This change falls well within the margin of error typically associated with mammal population surveys in contexts like this,” Simpson says.
Now, however, the paper suggests modern Batwa needs and lifestyles are different than the past and no longer necessarily harmonious with the forest.
The researchers found significant levels of deforestation in the northern tip of the highland sector (the Kalehe side), which some Batwa people reoccupied in 2018. Between 2019 and 2022, this area saw 1,602 hectares (3,959 acres) of forest loss. The authors attribute this to illegal charcoal production and trade involving many armed actors, including various Batwa chiefs who play a minor role though also sell access to the park to other groups.
The Batwa peoples’ extreme poverty today helps explain these actions, say sources.
This northern tip of the highland sector was not included in gorilla counts due to insecurity in the region, according to the authors of two surveys, though one paper after the Batwa returned said transect surveys didn’t find signs of gorillas there.
According to Williamson, where illegal activities are rampant, even if localized in the short term, gorillas will ultimately be impacted as the park is their stronghold.
“Engaging Indigenous Batwa people is critical for expanding sustainable research and conservation of the park,” he tells Mongabay.
Continued hunting and poaching by illegal miners of other groups looking for valuable minerals in the park remains an issue, according to a WCS study. Miners, often operating in isolated areas, turn to hunting great apes and other wildlife out of a need for food and protein as other food sources are unavailable. The expansion of farmland also leads to the fragmentation of remaining forest habitat.
“Community-based conservation activities may provide better protection to these primates and their environment,” and end the hunting of apes and other legally protected species, Muliri Dubois says.
In 2022, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights decided that the Batwa had the right to return to the forest with titled lands, though the implementation of this decision is uncertain. For now, WCS and the park authorities are in a public-private partnership to build alternative ways to conserve the park with the inclusion and benefit of Indigenous communities. Critics, however, maintain the initiative doesn’t include the Batwa peoples’ rights to return and live in the park.
Arthur Kalonji, director of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, tells Mongabay he’s convinced that engaging different stakeholders is critical for effective conservation of the protected area.
“Collaborative approaches to conservation must be equitable to make sure that these Indigenous communities are environmental stewards in protecting wildlife,” he says.
Citations:
O’Leary Simpson, F., Titeca, K., Pellegrini, L., Muller, T., & Muliri Dubois, M. (2025). Indigenous forest destroyers or guardians? The indigenous Batwa and their ancestral forests in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, DRC. World Development, 186, 106818. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106818
Plumptre, A. J., Nixon, S., Kujirakwinja, D. K., Vieilledent, G., Critchlow, R., Williamson, E. A., … Hall, J. S. (2016). Catastrophic decline of world’s largest primate: 80% loss of Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) population justifies critically endangered status. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0162697. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162697
Plumptre, A. J., Kirkby, A., Spira, C., Kivono, J., Mitamba, G., Ngoy, E., … Kujirakwinja, D. (2021). Changes in Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) and other primate populations in the Kahuzi‐Biega National Park and Oku Community Reserve, the heart of Grauer’s gorilla global range. American Journal of Primatology, 83(7). doi:10.1002/ajp.23288
Spira, C., Kirkby, A., Kujirakwinja, D., & Plumptre, A. J. (2017). The socio-economics of artisanal mining and bushmeat hunting around protected areas: Kahuzi-Biega National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Oryx, 53(1), 136-144. doi:10.1017/S003060531600171X
This article by Aimable Twahirwa, Latoya Abulu was first published by Mongabay.com on 16 December 2024. Lead Image: A Grauer’s gorilla family. Image courtesy of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
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