Protecting Gabon’s Ever-Flowing Spirit

Gabon is home to one of the world’s most intact networks of rivers, lakes, and wetlands, including many that maintain their natural, unregulated flows.

Here, rivers and forests enrich one another, merging twice a year as seasonal floods disperse seeds, deliver nutrients, and create spawning and nursery grounds for some of the country’s 400 fish species.

At the heart of this dynamic lies the Ogooué, one of Africa’s last free‑flowing and most powerful rivers. Its dark, tannin-rich water shapes remarkable evolutionary adaptations, including newly documented fish species that use electric signals to communicate and hunt.

Downstream, the river fans into the vast Bas Ogooué Ramsar site—a 13,700 km² mosaic of slow-moving channels, peatlands and lakes, home to hippos, manatees, three species of crocodiles, and vibrant riparian communities with deep cultural traditions.

Unlocking funding and potential

The effort to conserve Gabon’s natural heritage is getting a major momentum boost: a government-led conservation and community investment known as the Gabon Infini Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) initiative, which will unlock up to US$200 million over 10 years for Gabon’s conservation future.

Ripples of change on the lake

Aboard a turquoise-colored wooden fishing boat near the village of Iguerignama on Lake Anengué, Bowie Ossantsou, who works with Jean Churley Manfoumbi, shares a laugh with a fisherman from a local cooperative.

“My responsibility is to ensure that the community is very engaged,” says Bowie Ossantsou, a community-based conservation officer with TNC.

Fishing is central to life in Iguerignama. François Remeno, Iguerignama’s chief, is an active fisher, like his father before him. But a lot has changed since his father fished the lake.

“There are areas on the lake where fishermen can no longer fish,” says François Remeno.

An influx of newcomers is seeking to cash in on catching marketable fish. With so many more fishers on Gabon’s lakes and rivers, catches during the traditional fishing season are dwindling. To compensate, some fishers are extending their activities year-round, disrupting fish reproduction and putting the fishery and ecosystem further at risk.

To ensure there are fish in the region’s lakes and in the connected Ogooué River for the future, TNC and local organizations are helping groups of fishers institute more sustainable fishing practices, monitor the results and communicate these practices further.

Bowie Ossantsou ensures that conservation activity is based on input from the community. And with data showing that fish size and catch have increased as practices have changed, community members are tasting the results.

Over a wood fire, a stew of bright red and green peppers, onions and at least a dozen fish heads sizzles in a large aluminum pot.

“The river is alive. It has its own character,” says a fisherwoman in Iguerignama whom everyone calls Mama Sylvie. “It is full of resources. You have to listen to it.”

“With all of us practicing preservation, we can protect the river,” says Mama Sylvie.

Real-world challenges

Despite its conservation ambition, Gabon faces real-world challenges to balance, like meeting the current demand for power and building for the future. Power outages are common disruptors of daily life.

The government is evaluating a number of power-generating options, including plans to develop hydroelectric dams on some of its rivers. These are decisions that cannot be made hastily.

The construction of one dam can change an entire ecosystem, affecting the health of thousands of kilometers of river upstream and downstream.

Reducing the flow of the main channel of the Ogooué could cut off important natural pulses of water and nutrients that trigger life phases for aquatic life.

Dams could deprive the river of sediment, fundamentally altering the Ogooué’s unique blackwater web of life and cutting off supply to its sprawling and productive delta. And reservoirs created by dams could drown habitat, wiping out rare species that evolved with one stretch of river.

Hydropower is also vulnerable to changes in rainfall, a climate change signal already playing out in Gabon and globally. When rainfall decreases or becomes less predictable, it reduces the power available from hydroelectric dams.

TNC recently completed a study with the government and the International Finance Corporation to identify the national potential for solar and hydropower sites that avoid ecologically sensitive areas and displacing local communities.

The results of this initial assessment are promising, finding that there is enough potential energy capacity from lower-risk sites to meet Gabon’s current energy demands several times over.

The analysis suggests that Gabon may be able to meet many of its energy goals with carefully sited energy projects in less ecologically sensitive areas, avoiding large dams on the Ogooué and Ivindo Rivers. The next step is to validate the potential for these alternative sites through field engineering surveys.

Another challenge facing Gabon’s water future is mining. Artisanal gold mines in tributaries of the Ogooué are degrading water resources and ecosystems downstream. Beyond the direct impacts of extraction, mining operations for gold and for manganese, a key component in making steel and electric vehicle batteries, bring with them intensive energy needs. Increased mining across Gabon could further strain the country’s energy grid and add more pressure to the call for hydropower.

“If the new trajectory of the country is to assure development,” poses TNC’s Jean Churley Manfoumbi, “how can we make sure that Gabon is maintaining the standard of a ‘conservation country?’”

The importance of planning at scale

Worldwide, freshwater ecosystem protection remains a challenge, as conservation approaches and tools have largely been designed for terrestrial systems and are not well adapted to dynamic, flowing ecosystems.

Jean Hervé Mve Beh, whose government office oversees Gabon’s marine and freshwater resources, knows that solving this puzzle is critical for the nation’s present and future. “Freshwater programs are misunderstood,” he says. “We need to fully integrate freshwater ecosystems into national policies. We need to continue driving Gabon’s 30x30x30 ambition."

Part of this means understanding more about the pieces of the puzzle. “We can only manage what we know,” says Jean Hervé Mve Beh. “We need a law, but we also need to focus on improving our understanding.”

And part of it means seeing the full picture of freshwater conservation within and across watersheds and pursuing an integrated response.

That’s where Gabon Infini can help.

The funding unlocked by the PFP will help Gabon support community-driven ecosystem management and improved livelihoods in communities living along rivers and lakes. It will also support the conservation of priority freshwater ecosystems, the improvement of effective management of protected areas, and the strengthening of policies and legal frameworks for freshwater ecosystems.

A palpable step for Gabon—and a goal of the PFP—is to clarify the protection status and management for its Wetlands of International Importance, also known as Ramsar sites. The country has designated nine wetland areas, including the Bas Ogooué, as Ramsar sites. However, the special status does not yet grant binding protections or management resources for these wetlands nor for the rivers that flow into them.

“These sites must be legally recognized,” says Jean Hervé Mve Beh. “Management plans are needed to support them, with an inclusive approach focused on communities.”

In the Bas Ogooué Ramsar site, TNC is already collaborating with Gabon’s National Parks Agency on a management plan that brings in the region’s communities. The hope is that this plan can be a model for other important freshwater landscapes.

Increased support through Gabon Infini can be the tide that raises all boats and ensures work like Bowie Ossantsou’s, who engages directly with communities, can continue. He knows that when the people of Gabon look after water, they’re protecting so much more.

“Lakes and forests hold a central place in the lifestyle and imagination of the Gabonese people,” says Bowie Ossantsou.

"Far more than simple bodies of water or forest, they are sources of sustenance, places of memory and spirit. They are the spirit of Gabon.”