Nigeria is in the grip of an environmental emergency. A new report by the civil-society group We The People warns that forest loss in Cross River State is “likely the highest in the world,” driven by rampant illegal logging, land conversion and policy failures.
Officials, activists and community leaders have gathered in Calabar on August 21, 2025 to review the state’s ageing forestry law and propose urgent reforms.
According to recent analyses, nearly half of Nigeria’s historic forest cover has been razed in just a few decades.
In Cross River, long celebrated as home to West Africa’s largest rainforest, the destruction has been especially acute, putting gorillas, elephants and other endangered species at grave risk.
Experts describe the situation as nothing short of catastrophic. This report delves into the unfolding crisis: its scale, causes, and the urgent legal and political remedies being demanded.
A Ravaged Landscape: Forest Loss in Cross River
Decades of unchecked logging and land clearing have shattered Cross River’s forests and wildlife habitat. Satellite data show that Cross River State lost roughly 101,586 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2020 – about 8% of its forested area.
Within that, primary (untouched) rainforest losses are even starker: according to global forest analyses, Nigeria as a whole shed over 1,044,000 hectares of tree cover from 2001–2020 (about 10.4% of its year-2000 forests).
Mongabay reports that Cross River alone lost nearly 5% of its primary rainforestover 2002–2020.
Alarmingly, 2020 was the worst single year on record for deforestation in Cross River, with more primary forest cleared than in any year since 2002.
These losses have carved huge gaps in once-continuous jungles. Areas like the Afi River Forest Reserve and Cross River National Park, which are crucial corridors for wildlife, show widespread clearings and fire scars.
A 2018 study found that the Afi Reserve suffered the highest deforestation rate in the region, with annual losses rising twelve-fold from 1986 to 2010.
Even after Cross River imposed a logging ban in 2008, studies found that forests continued to vanish; by 2014 an estimated 1,070 km² had been lost despite the moratorium.
In short, the state’s rich rainforest, once called “evil” by colonial authorities to mark its sacredness, is rapidly being turned into farmland and barren land, with devastating consequences.
Drivers of Deforestation: Logging, Plantations and Mining
Experts at recent conferences agree that the drivers of Cross River’s forest collapse are multifaceted and intertwined. Local stakeholders warn that illegal logging by both local and foreign operators remains rampant.
Rogue enforcement officers and corrupt officials are often complicit: participants noted that “deforestation is being driven by foreigners who work with local collaborators to facilitate illegal logging, rogue law enforcement officials who circumvent the rules, and some compromised communities who provide access to loggers”.
Plantation agriculture is another major culprit. Rapid expansion of cocoa and palm oil plantations in former forest lands has been particularly destructive, as these monocultures offer none of the ecological benefits of natural forest.
A recent conference found that “the spread of plantations including cocoa plantations and oil palm plantations have emerged as a key driver of deforestation, noting that these plants do not play the same role as natural forests”.
In practice, farmers and companies are clearing and burning forests to plant cash crops; creating new farms while fragmenting critical ecosystems.
Compounding the crisis, solid mineral mining in forest reserves has surged in Cross River. Participants at We The People’s multi-stakeholder meetings warned that mining concessions in protected forest areas have become an “emergent factor in deforestation”.
Prospecting and excavation roads carve open canopy gaps, while miners often set fires or clear land for camps, spreading destruction. Satellite images from 2021 showed unusually high fire activity in forest reserves, with hundreds of blazes blamed on land-clearing and mining incursions.
Combined with the forest conversion to plantations and the failure to fund forest guards, these pressures have accelerated canopy loss to unprecedented levels in the region.
Key Drivers of Cross River Deforestation:
1. Illegal Logging: Organised timber syndicates (both local and foreign) have flooded remote forests, exploiting lax enforcement.
2. Agricultural Expansion: Cocoa, oil palm and other cash-crop plantations are replacing natural forest at a rapid pace.
3. Mining and Fires: New mining projects in reserves and fire-setting for land-clearing have created extensive scars.
4. Weak Enforcement: Under-resourced forestry agencies and corruption enable illegal activities to proceed unchecked.
Together, these factors form a vicious cycle: as natural forests shrink, remaining communities lose resources and sometimes resort to desperate measures (like setting fires) to compete for scarce farmland.
“Communities have always been the ones conserving the forest,” lamented the NGO’s Director Ken Henshaw, “but the government’s misguided ban (in 2008) [on farming] removed their stewardship role. External loggers then flooded in, accelerating forest destruction rather than halting it”.
In other words, wrong-headed policies have sometimes aggravated the problem.
An Outdated Forestry Law and Governance Failures
At the heart of Cross River’s crisis lies regulatory failure. Stakeholders agree that the Cross River State Forestry Law (2007) is now obsolete and toothless.
At a July 2025 conference, one expert noted bluntly that existing forest management instruments are “neither strong nor adequate to protect and conserve the forest, thereby exposing it to persistent degradation”.
The 2007 law predates today’s agribusiness boom and climate agenda, and lacks provisions to stop the myriad new threats.
Moreover, enforcement bodies, such as the Cross River Forestry Commission – are chronically underfunded and understaffed. The conference found that agencies “saddled with the responsibility of preserving the forests were ill funded, ill staffed and ill equipped”.
This chronic neglect means woodcutters face little risk of arrest. Participants further noted a troubling lack of political will. In some areas, officials are even accused of turning a blind eye or assisting illegal loggers.
A communique from a 2023 stakeholder meeting explicitly charged that some government agents “aid and abet illegal logging”, and lamented that the level of deforestation “raises doubts about [Cross River’s] current classification as the home of West Africa’s largest bristle rainforest”.
Pressure for reform has been building for years. After the 2008 logging ban backfired (by removing local community incentives to guard the forest), the state quietly lifted the moratorium in 2023. But replacing a blunt ban with nothing has left forests more vulnerable.
Environmentalists now say that without a robust law and enforcement, deforestation will continue unabated.
As one columnist warned, the destruction in Cross River “is probably the highest destruction of rainforest anywhere in the entire world. It’s higher than the spate of destruction in the Amazon”.
If true, Cross River State’s forest crisis would rival or exceed those of the planet’s great rainforests – a staggering indictment of the state’s governance.
We The People and Stakeholders: A Call for Legal Reform
This week’s news update comes from We The People, a Niger Delta-based advocacy NGO that has been sounding the alarm on deforestation. Its executive director, a veteran environmentalist, emphasised that cross-sector experts and community leaders have been convened in Abuja to scrutinise the old forestry law and draft amendments.
The message is urgent: the current law is “outdated and insufficient” for modern challenges. As one organiser explained, this review aims to align Cross River’s legislation with both Nigeria’s national climate commitments and international best practice.
The revisions under discussion cover many fronts. Stakeholders recommend:
1. Reviewing the 2007 Forestry Law: Update and tighten the legislation to close loopholes and reflect modern realities (e.g. carbon markets, climate change).
2. Strengthening Enforcement Agencies: Pump resources into the Cross River Forestry Commission and park rangers, giving them the training, equipment and autonomy needed to police forests effectively.
3. Empowering Local Communities: Formally recognise and fund community forest management, reversing decades of marginalisation so that indigenous groups once again have a stake in protecting their land.
4. Ending Commercial Exploitation: Ban logging, mining and plantation concessions in intact forests. Instead, channel economic benefits through ecotourism, carbon credit partnerships or sustainable agroforestry – so that forests become an asset for climate and livelihoods rather than a source of timber revenue.
These proposals echo what experts have been saying for years. For example, at a similar conference in 2023, participants passed a 37-point resolution urging exactly such reforms: scrapping timber concessions, bolstering legislation, and enlisting communities in guardianship.
The urgency is clear. Deforestation is not just an ecological issue but a crisis of governance and development that threatens food security, climate stability and social peace.
As one community leader put it, forest loss brings “social disruptions” and armed conflict as desperate people fight over shrinking resources.
Tropical Forest Context: How Nigeria Compares
Nigeria’s crisis is not unique, but it is severe. Globally, tropical rainforests are under siege. Brazil’s Amazon, for instance, lost about 11,568 km² in the 2021–2022 year (over 1.15 million hectares) – a rate roughly ten times larger in absolute area than Nigeria’s annual loss.
However, Amazon cover is huge to begin with, so in percentage terms deforestation there is significant but not unprecedented.
In contrast, Nigeria’s remaining forests are relatively small (many estimates put the forest area at under 10% of national land) so even modest absolute losses can have enormous proportional impact.
Indeed, a UN assessment once declared Nigeria’s deforestation rate “the highest in the world” during the 1990s–2000s, noting an 80% loss of old-growth forest (1990–2005) – the greatest of any country in that period.
Across Africa’s Congo Basin, the Democratic Republic of Congo has also seen millions of hectares vanish (over 21 million ha of tree cover since 2001.
Neighbouring Cameroon and Gabon report smaller but worrisome declines. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia have faced intense losses to palm oil. Indonesia alone historically lost an area the size of England over two decades.
All told, Nigeria’s deforestation pace (estimated at roughly 163,000 ha per year places it among the world’s fastest. In West Africa, it stands out: once ranked as one of the region’s greenest, Cross River’s status as the hub of West Africa’s rainforest is now hotly disputed.
Even amid booming Amazon fires in 2024, experts emphasise that halting loss in places like Nigeria will be crucial to meeting global climate targets.
Ecological and Social Impacts
The human and wildlife toll of this deforestation is grave. Cross River’s forests are home to critically endangered gorillas and forest elephants, rare monkeys, duikers and countless bird and plant species.
The iconic Cross River gorilla(a subspecies of Western gorilla) survives in only a few fragmented forests here and in Cameroon, with fewer than 300 individuals total.
As one WWF scientist warns, habitat loss now threatens these last strongholds: today “the cacophony of the forest is different, quieter” than decades ago.
Embedded communities who once protected the land are watching their heritage vanish. Customary rights that tied families to ancestral forests are being undermined; ironically, some locals say the only way to claim land in the official system is to clear it first, further incentivising chopping trees.
Environmentally, deforestation undermines climate resilience and rainfall. Cross River is a major carbon sink; losing it means more CO₂ emissions and fewer rain clouds.
Indeed, communities are already feeling the effects: farmers report more erratic weather and worse soil erosion after clearing forest, and recent “once-in-a-generation” storms have wreaked havoc on farmland and towns.
Wildlife-based tourism and traditional forest products (like bushmeat and medicinal plants) are also drying up. As one conservationist put it, “We are running out of time” to reverse these losses.
The conversion of forest into cocoa groves is one visible face of the crisis. Across southern Nigeria, cocoa farmers, often backed by urban investors, are expanding into old-growth forest.
Sacks of cocoa beans are being harvested on ground that was rainforest just a few years prior. While cocoa trade brings income, it has led to aggressive land-clearing in places like Afi Reserve.
In areas surrounding the reserve, farmers have boasted of clearing more land than they could farm personally, hoping to secure land titles or profit from rising cocoa prices. Without better enforcement or incentives, such patterns threaten to erase remaining forest patches in the coming years.
Conclusion: Urgent Reforms Needed
The picture painted by experts is alarmingly clear: Nigeria’s Cross River is undergoing an unprecedented rainforest collapse, propelled by outdated laws and unchecked exploitation. Even as world attention focuses on the Amazon and Congo, Africa’s last rainforests in Nigeria are bleeding dry.
Civil society voices, from local chiefs to global scientists, are demanding immediate action. Reviewing the 2007 forestry law, as planned by We The People and partners, is a critical first step. But it must be accompanied by real political will: funding forest guardians, integrating community stewardship, and stopping destructive industries outright.
For now, Cross River’s forests, long a symbol of Nigeria’s natural heritage, hang in the balance. As one analyst noted, we face a stark choice: “Either we value these forests for our children, or we let them become memories of a lost world.”.
With momentum building among NGOs, experts and even some government actors, the coming months will reveal whether Nigeria can arrest this crisis. Until then, the data and eyewitness reports make it painfully clear that Cross River’s rainforest is at a crossroads, and the clock is ticking.
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