Reported by: Ijeoma G | Edited by: Gabriel Osa
Nigeria’s forest crisis moved sharply back into focus on Saturday after the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, marking the 2026 International Day of Forests, warned that the country has lost nearly 90 percent of its forest cover over the past three decades and demanded urgent action to stop further destruction. In a statement issued in Lagos by the foundation’s Director of Communications, Policy and Advocacy, Kunle Olawoyin, the group said the pace of depletion now threatens not only biodiversity and climate stability, but also livelihoods, water systems, agriculture, and the wider economy.
The intervention was timed to coincide with this year’s International Day of Forests, observed every March 21 under the theme “Forests and economies.” That framing matters in Nigeria, where forests are often discussed as an environmental issue but less often as economic infrastructure. The UN and FAO say the 2026 theme is intended to highlight forests as engines of livelihoods, resilience, and productive economies. NCF adopted that line directly, arguing that forests are still undervalued in national development planning even though they underpin farming systems, protect watersheds, store carbon, and supply timber, fuel, food, and income for millions of people, especially in rural communities and forest-adjacent settlements.
NCF’s warning was stark. According to the foundation, less than 10 percent of Nigeria’s original forest landscape remains. It also said the country is losing about 400,000 hectares of forest each year, driven largely by illegal logging, agricultural expansion, urbanisation, and the heavy dependence of households on fuelwood and charcoal. Those factors have long been identified by conservation groups and international agencies, but the latest statement underscores the view that the losses are no longer gradual background damage. They are now of a scale that conservationists describe as a national emergency with ecological, public health, and economic implications.
Independent datasets broadly support the picture of sustained depletion, even when they use different definitions from the NCF’s “original forest cover” benchmark. Global Forest Watch reports that Nigeria had about 20 million hectares of natural forest in 2020, covering roughly 22 percent of its land area, and that between 2000 and 2020 the country experienced a net loss of about 1.5 million hectares of tree cover. Separate Global Forest Watch figures also indicate that Nigeria lost around 12,000 hectares of primary forest in 2023, alongside much larger overall tree cover losses. The World Bank, in a 2025 analysis of natural tree cover loss in Nigeria, said an estimated 2.4 million hectares of forest were lost between 2010 and 2022 and that the rate of loss is accelerating.
What is driving the losses is now better understood than it was a decade ago. NCF emphasized the familiar pressures of illegal logging, weak law enforcement, land conversion, and biomass energy demand. The World Bank’s analysis adds sharper granularity, showing that forest depletion in Nigeria is tied not just to commercial timber extraction but also to charcoal demand, agricultural clearing, and diffuse local pressures around settlements and farming zones. In practical terms, that means the crisis is not confined to criminal syndicates in remote reserves. It is also embedded in household energy poverty, population growth, weak governance, and the economic incentives that reward clearing land faster than protecting it.
The consequences reach well beyond disappearing trees. Forests regulate water flows, stabilize soils, moderate heat, and absorb carbon dioxide. When they are degraded, flooding risks rise in some areas, erosion intensifies, biodiversity declines, and agricultural productivity becomes more fragile. Nigeria’s remaining forests also hold critical habitat for wildlife and support communities that depend on forest products for daily survival. NCF Director-General Joseph Onoja used the International Day of Forests statement to frame the issue in existential terms, asking why society continues to destroy the systems that sustain life and urging an end to what he described as criminal and indiscriminate exploitation. That language reflected a growing frustration inside the conservation sector over weak enforcement and chronic policy underinvestment.
The foundation also used the moment to present itself not only as a critic, but as an actor attempting to reverse the trend. It said its Green Recovery Nigeria Programme aims to restore the country’s forest cover to 25 percent by 2047. As part of that effort, NCF reported planting 265,561 trees across various ecosystems in 2025 in partnership with other organizations. It also cited community-based forest management programmes, biodiversity conservation projects, forest reserve project management, and collaborations with government and the private sector intended to promote sustainable land use and alternative livelihoods. Those interventions matter, but by NCF’s own account they remain small relative to the scale of annual loss.
That imbalance is central to the wider story. Nigeria has no shortage of policy declarations on climate, biodiversity, and restoration. The deeper problem is execution: illegal logging networks persist, protected areas face encroachment, state and federal responsibilities overlap unevenly, and many households still have few viable energy alternatives to woodfuel. Forest protection therefore sits at the intersection of environmental policy, rural development, energy access, and law enforcement. Unless those sectors move together, tree planting campaigns alone are unlikely to close the gap. The NCF statement’s most serious message was not just that forests are vanishing, but that the country is still treating the issue as peripheral when it is in fact tied directly to food security, livelihoods, climate resilience, and long-term economic stability.
For now, the warning from Nigeria’s leading conservation organization amounts to a direct challenge to government at every level. NCF is calling for stronger forest governance, tougher enforcement of existing environmental rules, and greater funding for restoration and conservation. The underlying argument is that Nigeria cannot continue losing forests at current rates without paying a much higher national price later. On a day meant globally to celebrate the value of forests, the message from Lagos was more severe: Nigeria is running out of time to protect one of its most important natural assets, and the cost of delay is already being measured in lost land, lost resilience, lost habitats, and lost economic opportunity for future generations nationwide.
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