Sarah Tolbert (CWR ’09), an interdisciplinary forest conservation expert with more than a decade of experience working in sub-Saharan Africa, will give a talk titled “Working with Human Communities to Protect Gorilla Communities” Monday, March 28, at 5 p.m., in the Tinkham Veale University Center, Senior Classroom B.
Mountain gorillas are the only Great Ape species whose population is increasing. National governments, conservation partners, and tourism have been instrumental to this conservation success in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Uganda.
The population of the Grauer’s gorilla—found only in eastern DRC—however, has decreased by 77% in the last decade.
This talk will address the difference and what conservation organizations and national governments are doing to provide additional protections to the Grauer’s gorilla. The discussion will particularly focus on the role that local communities, who live near gorilla habitats, play in forest and wildlife conservation in DRC and Rwanda.
At a time when stories about extinction and climate change dominate environmental news, this talk highlights the hope that lies in working with communities to achieve seemingly impossible environmental goals.
About the speaker
Sarah Tolbert is an interdisciplinary forest conservation expert with over a decade of experience working in sub-Saharan Africa, starting with the Peace Corps in Benin and most recently with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in Musanze, Rwanda. She is continuing research while working on her PhD in geography at University of Wisconsin, Madison, with an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
She earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees from Case Western Reserve in 2009—in political science and environmental studies—and a Master of Arts in environmental management and global affairs from Yale University in 2016.