Rainforests have long played a central role in Liberia. Home to hundreds of thousands of people, they’re a source of sustenance, a site for cultural practice and habitat for forest elephants, western chimpanzees, and pygmy hippos. Massive rubber plantations carved out of them dominated the country’s economy for decades, and during the country’s civil war they provided timber that funded rebel groups. After the guns fell silent, Liberia overhauled its forestry laws to give communities a bigger role, with foreign donors pledging vast sums to support the reforms. Today, some of those donors are pulling back on their commitments, and new threats to Liberia’s forests are emerging. Nobody knows the importance of Liberia’s forests — or the challenges of protecting them — better than Silas Siakor. A prominent voice pushing for community rights in forest management, he was instrumental in designing the postwar legal reforms as well as the exposure of logging corruption scandals. In 2006, Siakor was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for his work investigating illegal logging under former President Charles Taylor. With the prize money, he set up an environmental watchdog group, the Sustainable Development Institute. Now, he’s helping to run an innovative pilot project in Liberia’s southeast Sinoe county, where 28 communities are set to begin receiving direct “area-based payments” from the Irish government in exchange for conserving their forests. “Two things came to mind when I first started to think about this approach,” he told Mongabay. “How do we incentivize forest owners to keep their…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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