A safe haven for the world’s newest monkey

How protecting a forest safeguards the life we are only just beginning to discover.

Deep in Lomami National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lives a small monkey with orange lips and a shaggy black coat. Local communities call it the Likweli. Scientists have just confirmed it as a species new to science, and it turns out to have been living quietly in that forest all along.

The Likweli, now formally named Colobus congoensis, is one of only five new African monkey species described in the past seventy-five years, and the second to be found in Lomami. It was first glimpsed in a blurry photograph back in 2008. It took nearly two decades of patient fieldwork, on foot and by canoe, to gather the evidence to confirm what it was. All that time, it was simply going about its life, high in the forest canopy, whether or not science had a name for it.

Protection came first

Here is the part that matters most. The forest was protected before anyone knew this monkey was there to protect. Rainforest Trust, One Tribe’s conservation partner, helped safeguard this area and supported the surveys and the anti-poaching teams that guard it against the bushmeat trade. That protection was in place long before the Likweli was confirmed as new to science.

In Rainforest Trust’s own words, the world’s newest monkey now has a safe haven in Lomami, thanks to those teams, their local partners and their supporters. The protection did not wait for proof that something rare was hiding there. It came first, and the discovery followed.

You protect the whole forest, not the parts you can name

It would be easy to tell this story as though One Tribe and Rainforest Trust happened to back the right forest. That is not the lesson, and it is not how conservation works. Protecting a rainforest is never a bet on which patch will turn out to matter. Every stretch of forest holds far more than any survey has counted: species not yet described, relationships not yet understood, life carrying on regardless of whether we have catalogued it.

The Likweli did not become valuable the day it was named. It was always there, always part of what made this forest worth protecting. Naming it simply revealed a fraction of what protection was already safeguarding. That is true of every protected forest, which is exactly why protecting them, broadly and without waiting for a reason, is the whole point.

The Likweli did not become worth protecting the day it was named. It was always there. Protection simply kept its home standing until we met it.

Where One Tribe comes in

Through our partnership with Rainforest Trust, the businesses, venues and events measuring their footprint with One Tribe play a part in protecting places like Lomami. Not an abstract line in a report, but real forest, kept standing, with real consequences for the life inside it, including life we are only just beginning to understand.

This is what we mean when we talk about what sits behind the numbers on an impact page. A footprint measured and acted on is not just a figure to file away. Followed through, it becomes a contribution to somewhere real: a forest that stays a forest, and a safe haven for species we have met, and for the many we have not.

We are proud to play a small part in this. And we are glad the forest was protected long before anyone knew just how much was depending on it.

This is what sits behind the numbers: not an abstract offset, but a protected forest, and everything in it we have yet to discover.

With thanks to Rainforest Trust for the work they do, and for letting us share this story.