Angola named Serra do Pingano a conservation area

Angola has given Serra do Pingano, a block of mountain forest in Uíge province, a conservation-area boundary. Mongabay reported the designation on October 30, 2026. The law was made in April. Scientists had asked for protection since at least 2010, and authorities responded favorably to a national-park proposal in 2021, but the boundary was not drawn until this year.

The English article, first published in Portuguese on October 9, is as much a warning as a celebration. A paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution this year found that the central forest lost 43 percent of its cover over two decades. The wider Serra do Pingano Forest Ecosystem lost 21 percent, about 536 square kilometres. Thea Lautenschläger, an ethnobotanist who works in northern Angola and directs the Botanical Garden of Hamburg, told Mongabay that at least half of Serra do Pingano is already deforested, and that the protected area is smaller than researchers proposed. She said some of the best remaining habitat is being cleared now. Farming and charcoal are the pressures she named.

The forest sits between rainforest and miombo savanna and holds plants and animals found nowhere else, including the Pingano balsam and the Angolan dwarf galago, plus frogs that are not yet formally described. A recently found group of African forest elephants in Serra Vamba, inside the wider ecosystem, may also be at risk. The law lists environmental education, ecotourism, and sustainable use among the area's goals. Lautenschläger said Angola already has enough evidence to know these forests matter. What has been missing is putting that knowledge into a boundary on time. The new area is that boundary. It does not restore the forest already gone.