Editor’s Note
This stark image from Madagascar captures the devastating impact of illegal deforestation for sapphire mining. While officially protected, this rainforest—a vital habitat for lemurs and other species—has been cleared, leaving a single sacred tree standing. It serves as a powerful symbol of both loss and resilience in the face of environmental exploitation.
Only a sacred tree remains standing in this officially protected but illegally deforested plot of forest, cleared for sapphire mines in Madagascar. This rainforest is a crucial habitat for lemurs and other species.
Standing 60 centimeters tall, indris are the largest lemurs in Madagascar and heavy sleepers. These primates wake up two or three hours after sunrise, forage for leaves high in the canopy between daytime naps, and choose their sleeping spot long before nightfall.
Photographer Adriane Ohanesian, guide-interpreter Safidy Andrianantenaina, and I often heard their calls during our journey through the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor, also known as CAZ. This sound, akin to a person blowing into a trombone for the first time, can carry through the lush forest for nearly two kilometers.
We ventured deep into the CAZ, a roughly 3,800 km² expanse of rainforest that connects two national parks, allowing different populations of lemurs and other animals to mix and maintain the genetic diversity essential for their survival. Our goal was to witness firsthand the impact of illegal gemstone mining on some of the last habitats of wild lemurs.
Our first stop was the makeshift village of Ambodipaiso. This site hosts clandestine sapphire mines that have transformed parts of the CAZ into treeless, degraded wastelands. Sapphires were discovered here seven years ago, and by 2016, tens of thousands of Malagasy people had flooded the area, illegally felling trees and diverting streams in the hope of finding precious stones to escape poverty. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Madagascar ranks 161st globally in terms of human development, with 70% of the population living in poverty.
The World Bank estimates that tens of millions of euros worth of sapphires and other gemstones were smuggled out of Madagascar in 1999 alone. While these figures remain the most reliable, recent estimates suggest an amount of around 130 million euros per year.
notes Christoph Schwitzer, vice-chair of the Madagascar Primate Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the organization that determines the conservation status of animals and plants.
Madagascar possesses the world’s third richest biodiversity, behind Brazil and Indonesia. Eight out of ten plants and animals there are endemic. The country is home to sixty-two species of chameleons, three hundred species of reptiles, and as many amphibians, 99% of which live nowhere else. Madagascar is also the only place on Earth, along with the Comoros archipelago, where lemurs live in the wild. There are one hundred and thirteen species, the last of which was identified just last year.
These charismatic animals attract about 250,000 visitors annually; tourism generates over 6% of the country’s GDP and 5% of its jobs. Yet, almost all lemur species are threatened: thirty-eight, including the indri, are critically endangered, and seventeen have already gone extinct. Ecologists and primatologists now fear the consequences of gemstone mining on the lemurs’ remaining habitat, 90% of which has already been lost to deforestation and urbanization.
explains Christoph Schwitzer.
Jonah Ratsimbazafy, vice-chair alongside Christoph Schwitzer of the IUCN’s Madagascar Primate Specialist Group, told me before I set foot on Malagasy soil.