Nigerian scientist wins global prize for bat conservation
In Nigeria, bats are not celebrated. They are feared, avoided, and in many communities, deeply entangled with beliefs about witchcraft. It is not the most obvious backdrop for a conservation success story, but that is exactly what Iroro Tanshi has managed to write.
The Nigerian ecologist has been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious environmental honours, for her remarkable campaign to protect an endangered bat species in south-eastern Nigeria, a campaign that required her to first change the minds of the very communities living alongside the animals.
The story began with a discovery. Inside the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, Tanshi encountered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, a species that had not been documented in nearly 50 years. It should have been, as she put it, “big headliner news.” Instead, what followed was a crisis.
“There was a serious situation… wildfires,” she told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.
Her team suspects the blaze was started by a farmer clearing land near the forest. What began as a small fire grew into a weeks-long inferno that swallowed the landscape around the sanctuary, leaving Tanshi and her colleagues helpless as the habitat she had only just rediscovered burned around them.
“That fire burned for about three weeks until the rain came. There was nothing people could do – we just kept watching it every day,” she said.
Rather than retreating into despair, Tanshi turned the disaster into the foundation of a community-driven conservation movement. The key, she realized, was not to lead with the bats, it was to lead with the fire.
“It’s really the question of: ‘How do we convince people to protect the habitat? In our case, it was because the wildfire problem was also a community problem – that was the hook,” she explained.
By framing wildfire prevention as something that served farmers and residents directly, Tanshi built community fire brigades that have successfully kept serious fires out of and around the 24,700-acre sanctuary from 2022 through to May 2025. People joined not necessarily out of love for bats, but because they too wanted to protect their farms, and in doing so, they ended up protecting an endangered species.
Changing deeply held cultural beliefs was an equally important part of the work. Tanshi and her team engage communities through multiple media channels, with particular attention paid to children, aiming to reframe the bat not as a creature of darkness but as an essential thread in Nigeria’s ecological fabric.
She points to shea butter, a product woven into daily life across Africa and used in cosmetic products worldwide, as a compelling example of what would be lost without bats.
“Your shea butter that a lot of people use, either raw or in cosmetic products around the world, is because of bats, which disperse the seeds of the tree,” she said. “So essentially, you come to see that they play so many critical roles, it’s almost impossible to ignore them.”
Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Tanshi said the recognition affirmed the global significance of work that can sometimes feel isolated and overlooked.
“There are very few things in this world that signal to you that the work that you’re doing has global relevance than things like this,” she said, describing the honour as “incredible.”
She is one of six recipients of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize, and in a landmark moment for the award’s 37-year history, every single winner this year is a woman.
Source: BBC
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