Pangolin Conservation in the DRC: Congo Basin's Hidden Battle

The Democratic Republic of Congo is, by almost any biological measure, one of the most important countries on earth for pangolin conservation. It contains the world's second largest tropical rainforest, a staggering diversity of wildlife, and confirmed populations of up to four pangolin species. It is also, by almost any political and logistical measure, one of the most difficult places on earth to practise conservation. Decades of armed conflict, institutional collapse, and extreme poverty have made the DRC's vast forests simultaneously a refuge for wildlife and an arena of ongoing destruction. Understanding what is happening to pangolins in the Congo Basin requires engaging seriously with both dimensions of that reality.

Four Species, One Country

No other country in Africa hosts as many pangolin species as the Democratic Republic of Congo. The white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis), the continent's most abundant pangolin species, ranges across the entire Congo Basin rainforest and is the most frequently encountered in forest communities and markets. The black-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla), sometimes called the long-tailed pangolin, inhabits the same forest zone but is more specialised, preferring riparian forest edges and swamp forest margins where it forages in low vegetation and occasionally swims across rivers.

The giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea), Africa's largest pangolin species, occupies the forest floor of primary and old-growth secondary forest across the Congo Basin, where it excavates the formidable mounds of driver ants and carpenter ants. It is significantly less abundant than either of the tree pangolins and far more difficult to detect. In the south-east of the country, where the Congo Basin forest gives way to miombo woodland and Zambezian savanna, Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) may also be present, though published records from this region are sparse.

The Congo Basin: A Forest That Shelters and Conceals

The Congo Basin contains approximately 3.3 million square kilometres of tropical forest, of which the DRC holds the dominant share. This forest is the primary global habitat for three of the four African pangolin species, and it provides them with an ecological structure — dense closed canopy, abundant ant and termite colonies, complex three-dimensional vegetation — that is essentially irreplaceable. Even heavily hunted areas retain pangolin populations if the forest itself remains intact, because the habitat is so productive that it can support relatively high densities of insectivores.

The forest also makes conservation enormously difficult. Monitoring wildlife in closed-canopy equatorial rainforest is technically challenging: camera traps must be carefully positioned, acoustic monitoring is less useful for a silent animal, and ground surveys encounter visibility limits of a few metres in dense undergrowth. The white-bellied pangolin's habit of foraging in the mid-canopy means that traditional ground-based survey methods miss a significant fraction of the population. The giant ground pangolin's nocturnal, slow-moving behaviour makes it nearly invisible to daytime observers and even to camera traps unless these are positioned correctly over active termite mounds.

Armed Conflict and Its Conservation Consequences

The eastern DRC has been in a state of protracted armed conflict since the 1990s, with periodic escalations that have killed millions of people and displaced millions more. The provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Maniema, Ituri, and Tanganyika have all experienced sustained armed activity involving national army units, foreign militias, local self-defence forces, and criminal networks that blend political, ethnic, and economic motives.

For pangolin conservation, this conflict environment has several specific consequences. First, protected area management in conflict zones is effectively impossible. Rangers cannot patrol safely, patrol schedules become unpredictable, and entire national parks become de facto ungoverned spaces where enforcement is absent. Virunga National Park, one of Africa's oldest and most famous protected areas, has lost more than 200 rangers to armed attack since 1996. If rangers cannot safely patrol for gorillas in a UNESCO World Heritage Site, they are not systematically monitoring pangolins.

Second, bushmeat hunting intensifies wherever large numbers of combatants or displaced persons concentrate. Pangolins are nutritionally valuable, relatively easy to catch (their defensive curling behaviour makes them simple to collect once found), and their meat is prized across Central Africa. A displaced community of several thousand people near a forest margin will exert significant hunting pressure on all accessible wildlife, including pangolins.

Third, armed groups have exploited wildlife trafficking as a revenue source. Pangolin scales, which are compact, relatively light, and command high prices in Asian markets, are an attractive commodity for any group that controls territory adjacent to forest. The link between armed groups and pangolin trafficking in the eastern DRC has been documented by TRAFFIC and by investigative journalists, though the precise scale of this trade remains difficult to quantify.

Key Protected Areas

Salonga National Park

Salonga is Africa's largest tropical forest national park, covering approximately 36,000 square kilometres in the central Congo Basin. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated for its exceptional biodiversity, and it is one of the most important single sites globally for forest pangolin conservation. Its remoteness — Salonga is accessible only by river and is weeks of travel from the nearest major road — has historically provided a degree of protection through sheer inaccessibility. However, it also means that enforcement capacity is low and that the park's interior is rarely patrolled.

Surveys conducted by the WCS Congo programme have documented white-bellied and black-bellied pangolins within Salonga, and the park almost certainly harbours a significant giant ground pangolin population in its old-growth forest zones. The park is managed in partnership between ICCN and WWF-DRC.

Okapi Wildlife Reserve

The Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Ituri Forest of north-east DRC was established primarily to protect the okapi, one of the world's rarest large mammals. The Ituri Forest is one of Africa's most biologically diverse forest ecosystems and supports all three of the Congo Basin's pangolin species. The reserve has been subject to significant pressure from artisanal gold mining, which brings large influxes of workers who hunt bushmeat intensively. Conservation work by WCS and ICCN has focused on maintaining patrol capacity in the face of these pressures.

Maiko National Park

Maiko National Park, covering approximately 10,800 square kilometres in North Kivu, is one of the least studied national parks in the DRC. Its forests are among the most intact in the eastern Congo Basin, but security conditions have made systematic biological surveys extremely difficult. The few surveys that have been conducted suggest very high wildlife density, and pangolin populations are presumed to be significant, though no published data confirm population estimates.

The Bushmeat Trade and Market Dynamics

In the Congo Basin, pangolins are primarily threatened by the bushmeat trade rather than by the international scale trade that dominates coverage in East and West Africa. White-bellied and black-bellied pangolins are regularly sold in local markets across the DRC, from village markets adjacent to forest to urban markets in Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Lubumbashi. The species' relatively small body size and the ease of smoking or drying pangolin meat for preservation make them convenient bushmeat products.

This domestic trade is largely invisible to international statistics. A pangolin killed and eaten in a village ten kilometres from where it was caught will never appear in a seizure database or a CITES trade record. Research by TRAFFIC and local partners has attempted to quantify this trade through market surveys, but the dispersed geography of the DRC — the country is larger than Western Europe — makes comprehensive assessment impossible.

The international trade also affects DRC pangolins. Pangolin scales collected in the DRC have been documented in large seizures in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Malaysia, suggesting organised export networks. The DRC's extensive borders and limited customs enforcement capacity make it both a source and a transit country for the international scale trade.

Conservation Organisations and Their Work

Working in the DRC requires operational resilience that few organisations possess. The organisations that have maintained long-term conservation programmes in the country have done so by building local partnerships, investing in community relationships over years, and accepting that external staff cannot operate in conflict zones and that national Congolese conservation staff must carry the primary operational burden.

WWF-DRC operates one of the largest conservation programmes in the country, with long-standing engagement in the Congo Basin forests, the KAZA corridor landscape in the south-east, and community conservation in buffer zones around protected areas. The WWF programme includes capacity-building for ICCN rangers, community livelihood programmes designed to reduce bushmeat hunting pressure, and advocacy for improved wildlife law enforcement.

The Wildlife Conservation Society has maintained a presence in the DRC since the 1980s and has conducted the most systematic wildlife survey work in the country's least accessible areas. WCS teams have documented pangolins across multiple landscapes and contribute data to the IUCN assessments that underpin global conservation status decisions.

The African Wildlife Foundation works in landscape corridors and community conservation areas, including areas adjacent to key pangolin habitat. AWF's model emphasises linking conservation finance to community benefit, creating economic incentives for communities living alongside wildlife to protect rather than hunt it.

The Scale of the Challenge

The DRC presents pangolin conservation at its most daunting scale. A country of over 100 million people, spread across 2.3 million square kilometres of territory, with limited infrastructure, ongoing armed conflict, acute poverty, and institutional capacity constraints — this is the operating environment for pangolin protection in one of the species' most important global habitats. The forest pangolins that live in Salonga's interior or in the Okapi Reserve are, for now, relatively protected by their inaccessibility. Those living near forest margins, near mining sites, or near conflict-affected communities face pressures that conservation organisations are working hard to mitigate but cannot fully control.

What is not in doubt is the biological importance of what the DRC's forests contain. Every functioning hectare of Congo Basin forest that remains is pangolin habitat. The decisions made about forest governance, mining concessions, agricultural expansion, and armed conflict resolution in the DRC over the next decade will determine the fate of a significant fraction of Africa's forest pangolin populations.