Madagascar: One of the Most Important Places for Life on Earth - Madagascar

What the report says

AllAfrica published a guest column on 21 July 2026 by Liva Raharijaona, Madagascar’s 30x30 Coordinator at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, and James Deutsch, CEO of Rainforest Trust, arguing that Madagascar is at a pivotal point for biodiversity conservation. The authors say the island is home to more than 150,000 species found nowhere else, including lemurs, and that its forests may still contain species not yet formally identified by science.

According to the column, Madagascar’s conservation ambitions gained momentum in the early 2000s, when the government committed to protecting 10 percent of its land and territorial waters. That progress was later disrupted after the 2009 political crisis, which the authors link to increased illegal rosewood harvesting, rising deforestation and stalled conservation projects. They write that local communities, conservation groups and some government officials continued working despite instability.

The authors say a more recent national commitment to the global “30x30” target — protecting 30 percent of land and sea by 2030 — has continued under the current administration. They cite the unlocking of long-delayed protected area designations, including 21 new temporary protected areas covering more than three million acres. They also report that in March 2026, 50 scientists from seven fields, most of them Malagasy, completed the country’s first full reprioritization of conservation areas since 1995, identifying about 44 million acres of priority land.

The column stresses that protected areas require more than legal boundaries, pointing to the need for financing, management, enforcement, restoration, monitoring and community benefits. It frames Madagascar’s current conservation push as globally significant because of the island’s exceptional endemic biodiversity and the potential loss if habitats continue to decline.