A Nigerian scientist’s “personal experience” with a wildfire, its threat to endangered bats she discovered just days before, and her campaign to protect them, has won her the global Goldman Environmental Prize.
Found in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary in south-eastern Nigeria, Iroro Tanshi said seeing the short-tailed roundleaf bat for the first time in almost 50 years, should have been “big headliner news”.
But there was a “serious situation… wildfires”, she told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.
In a country where bats are often associated with witchcraft, Tanshi successfully launched a community-led campaign to protect them by preventing wildfires in the areas where they live.
Speaking of how she changed local perceptions of bats, the ecologist said: “It’s really the question of: ‘How do we convince people to protect the habitat?’
“In our case, it was because the wildfire problem was also a community problem – that was the hook.”
Tanshi – who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, in the US with a focus on bats – had identified human-induced wildfires as one of the threats faced by the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bats.
She told Focus on Africa that her team suspects the fire that triggered her campaign was started by a farmer trying to clear land near the forest.
As well as educating local people on wildfires and prevention, the campaign also works to inform people about the importance of bats in nature.
Credit: bbc.com
