Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund Expands Protection for Grauer’s Gorillas in Congo

ATLANTA, Sept. 24, 2026 /CourierPR/ -- On World Gorilla Day, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund announced the formal recognition of an additional 445 square kilometers of community-managed forest within the 2,400-square-kilometer Nkuba Conservation Area (NCA) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This recognition, granted through the Congolese government’s community forest framework, brings the total portion of the Fossey Fund’s Nkuba Conservation Area that has received formal legal recognition to 91 percent. The move strengthens protections for Grauer’s gorillas, one of the world’s most threatened great apes, and their critical forest habitat.

Grauer’s gorillas, also known as eastern lowland gorillas, have experienced dramatic declines across their range, driven by habitat loss, hunting, and other pressures. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Green Status assessment, the subspecies is classified as Critically Depleted, reflecting substantial population declines and loss of range over recent decades. The Green Status measures how close a species is to full ecological recovery across its historical range, complementing the IUCN Red List’s assessment of extinction risk.

The recognition of the Mohoo forest concession (CFCL) is an important step forward for the people and wildlife of Nkuba. Dr. Tara Stoinski, President and CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, emphasized the significance of this achievement.

The Nkuba Conservation Area, established in 2012 by the Fossey Fund and local communities, is a vast primary forest landscape in eastern DRC. Located within the Congo Basin and strategically positioned between Kahuzi-Biega and Maiko National Parks, Nkuba provides critical habitat for Grauer’s gorillas and at least nine other globally threatened large mammals. Unlike a traditional national park, Nkuba is built around a model in which local communities retain legal rights to their traditional lands while taking responsibility for managing those forests sustainably.

The Fossey Fund has worked alongside communities to help landowners navigate the process of securing formal recognition through Concessions Forestières des Communautés Locales (CFCLs), or local community forest concessions. Under this framework, communities receive formal, perpetual rights to their traditional forests while committing to sustainable management practices. Communities can continue to use forest resources that are essential to their livelihoods, such as water and medicinal plants, while maintaining the forest as a functioning ecosystem.

The model recognizes a fundamental reality of conservation in the DRC: protecting wildlife also requires protecting the people who share its habitat.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, established in 1967 by famed primatologist Dian Fossey, has a team of over 300 staff working in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The organization’s work combines community engagement, forest protection, biodiversity research, and conservation planning to create a landscape where people and wildlife can coexist. Since the Fossey Fund began working in Nkuba, the killing of gorillas has stopped, while threatened wildlife, including forest elephants that had been locally eliminated by poaching, have begun returning to the area.

Nkuba has also been recognized as a Key Biodiversity Area and is being considered as a potential example of an Other Effective Conservation Measure (OECM), a designation for areas that effectively conserve biodiversity outside traditional protected areas. The approach also creates an important conservation corridor across a landscape much larger than any single community or protected area. As additional communities secure legal recognition of their forests, the result is an increasingly connected landscape in which wildlife can move through protected habitat while communities retain rights to sustainably manage their natural resources.

Despite the challenges posed by ongoing civil unrest, insecurity, limited infrastructure, and significant public health threats, including the largest recorded Ebola outbreak in the DRC, the Fossey Fund’s staff, alongside local community leaders, have continued their work.

The recognition of Mohoo, along with two other CFCLs earlier this year, is particularly significant. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is grateful for the financial support of Rainforest Trust and other partners, including the Arcus Foundation, Daniel K. Thorne Foundation, Disney Conservation Fund, Planet Women, Weeden Foundation, and AZA Gorilla SAFE members. The organization’s people-centered approach to conservation is focused on four pillars: protecting individual gorillas, their families, and their forest homes; conducting critical science needed to develop conservation strategies; creating future conservation leaders to address the conservation challenges of the future; and helping communities living near gorillas through livelihood, food security, and education initiatives.

The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s work in Nkuba is part of its broader commitment to protecting gorillas and their habitats in some of the most challenging conservation landscapes in Africa.