Where the forest meets the sea
Restoring the health of the whole in Madagascar’s MaMaBay
Most conservation assumes you have to choose between people and nature. In Madagascar's MaMaBay, they are inseparable.
Picture a mother of four, standing at the edge of an ancient rainforest with a machete in her hands. For generations, her family faced an impossible choice: clear these towering trees to plant rice and feed her children today, or watch them go hungry. In a country where 99% of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, survival has long meant choosing between feeding families or preserving the forest.
But today, things are different. She earns 101% more income working within the forest than she ever did cutting it down.
This transformation is happening in one of the world’s poorest countries, in a region facing mounting climate pressures, while protecting something that exists nowhere else on Earth.
Where the Forest Meets the Sea
When Madagascar broke from Africa 165 million years ago, it became an evolutionary laboratory creating impossible life found nowhere else: lemurs that sing at dawn, fossas that hunt in cathedral canopies, dugongs that graze in underwater meadows. Two-thirds of the world's chameleons, seven of eight baobab species, 95% of its land mammals—they're all here and only here.
Here, along the northeastern coast of Madagascar, massive humpback whales breach the water with thunderous splashes, part of an annual gathering where these ocean giants come to give birth and nurse their young. Their songs echo against a backdrop rarely seen anywhere else on Earth: a vast and vibrant expanse of rainforest that cascades right down into coral-rich waters.
This is MaMaBay – Makira Natural Park, Masoala National Park, and Antongil Bay. Despite its designation as three separate protected areas, they are in fact interconnected and interdependent ecosystems where land and water, wildlife and communities, are inseparably linked.
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MaMaBay spans 1.8 million hectares containing a significant portion of Madagascar's unique wildlife and the world's total biodiversity in an area roughly the size of Slovenia.
A varied and unbroken chain of habitats – stretching from forested peaks 1,400 meters above sea level to coral gardens 30 meters below – have created extraordinary conditions for biodiversity to flourish.
If MaMaBay is lost, it is gone forever.
For 300,000 people living in and around MaMaBay, these aren’t just complex and interconnected ecosystems – it's the fabric and foundation of daily life that provides everything from water to food, from building materials to livelihoods. Every aspect of existence is intimately tied to the health of these lands and seas.
These are the communities that have lived in relationship with this extraordinary place for generations, caring for the environment just as it takes care of them.
A system under mounting strain
The pressures facing MaMaBay aren't isolated problems – they're complex forces that amplify each other.
Madagascar has lost 80% of its original forest cover. Each year, over 60,000 hectares of rainforest disappear, mostly to slash-and-burn agriculture. Illegal miners target quartz and precious stones, loggers hunt rare ebony and rosewood, industrial interests’ eye offshore oil exploration setting in motion a cascade of consequences that ripple through the whole living system.
Without hillside trees to anchor the earth, pressures create cascading destruction through the interconnected web of life – red soil bleeding into rivers, sediment smothering coral reefs and marine animals. As fish populations crash, protein scarcity drives hunters deeper into the remaining forests, and the cycle continues.
Facing increasingly frequent and severe droughts, cyclones, and extreme weather events, Madagascar is also highly vulnerable to climate change. Climate change has displaced over 800,000 people in just ten years. In the south, farmers who have worked the same plots for generations now watch their crops wither. These climate pressures are driving families northward into MaMaBay in the hopes of survival.
The breakthrough insight
When the Wildlife Conservation Society first arrived in MaMaBay thirty years ago, scientific research was the focus. In 1997, they helped establish the protected area Masoala and, by 2012, Makira as well.
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Over time, it became clear that protecting individual places isn't enough when the people who live there face impossible pressures. The mounting pressures in MaMaBay – from climate change to economic desperation, from resource extraction to agricultural challenges – are deeply interrelated and can only be addressed by understanding their complex connections.
For generations, conservation assumed we had to choose between protecting forests or feeding families. But human prosperity and ecosystem health are inseparable, and we can design approaches that strengthen both.
One insight changed everything: We must make protecting nature more valuable than destroying it.
Incentivizing nature’s protection
Makira REDD+ is one of the first forest carbon credit projects in the world. It reimagines conservation not as a restriction or cost but as a positive, generative system that benefits both local communities and the global environment.
Spanning 360,000 hectares of dense primary forest surrounded by an additional 350,000 hectares of community-managed land, it flips the traditional model: 50% of revenues flow directly to 90,000 people across 120 villages. This isn’t a top-down conservation strategy, but a system that recognises local stakeholders as the primary architects of nature’s preservation. Communities decide how the money is spent — on schools, health clinics, agricultural improvements, and infrastructure that makes daily life better. The results:
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Creating economic alternatives
If protecting nature must be more valuable than destroying it, people need real alternatives. On deforested land, farmers now grow cacao alongside native trees through dynamic agroforestry — rehabilitating cleared areas close to the forest in a way that provides income, discourages further clearing, and creates habitat corridors for wildlife.
Over 500 farmers are participating in the MaMaBay Conservation Enterprise.
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Beyond cacao, rice farmers are learning techniques that increase yields without clearing more forest. Fish and chicken farming provides protein while reducing pressure on wild animal populations. Honey production supports local economies and ecosystem pollinators. Where slash-and-burn agriculture once destroyed forest cover, these new methods are restoring degraded landscapes.
For families who joined, the calculus has shifted: the forest is no longer an obstacle to income. It is the source of it.
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Transforming
governance models
In Malagasy, Tanindrazana means ‘the land of the ancestors.’ For generations, the communities of MaMaBay have understood their relationship with this landscape not as ownership but as stewardship — a responsibility passed down through families, embedded in the rhythms of planting, fishing, and forest management.
By supporting local communities to obtain legal rights to manage and sustainably use the lands surrounding the protected areas, CS is innovating new ways for conservation and communities to support one another.
A new form of
environmental government
Now, WCS is pioneering an entirely new form of environmental governance: community federations. When villages unite into federations, it enables communities to connect, share knowledge, and act together. They can pool their carbon credit revenues to build schools and health clinics. They can advocate collectively for stronger laws against illegal logging and mining. Most importantly, they gain a voice in international climate negotiations – ensuring that global policies affecting their forests are informed by their generational, on-the-ground wisdom.
Transforming individual efforts into a powerful collective force, they create the mechanisms for communities to mobilize resources and influence policy from local landscapes to international platforms.
This transforms scattered individual efforts into a powerful collective force.
A blueprint that can scale
Here's what makes MaMaBay's success so significant: it's proving a blueprint that could work at the scale our planet actually needs.
Traditional protected areas cover less than a fifth of Earth's land, but biodiversity continues collapsing at unprecedented rates. Traditional conservation assumed you could save nature by keeping people out. But here’s what we know now: Indigenous Peoples and local communities are stewards of some of the world's most biodiverse and intact landscapes.
Over 1 billion people rely on forest resources for their livelihoods. In Brazil's Amazon, the lowest deforestation rates occur in Indigenous territories — between 1985 and 2020, 90% of Amazon deforestation happened outside them. Globally, at least 36% of the world's remaining intact forests are on Indigenous peoples' lands — and loss rates there are consistently lower than elsewhere.
These aren’t coincidences.
When communities have secure rights and sustainable livelihoods, ecosystems thrive. When they struggle, irreplaceable habitats disappear.
MaMaBay's 1.8 million hectares with 300,000 people demonstrates that an approach to conservation that benefits both people and nature can work at landscape scale. Not just in small community projects or individual parks, but across vast ecosystems where thousands or millions of people depend on the land.
The path forward
Today, where the rainforest of Masoala meets the waters of Antongil Bay, the evidence of transformation is visible. Clear streams reflect forest canopy, coral reefs brighten with new growth, fish populations recover as coastal communities manage their own marine reserves.
But MaMaBay isn't just an ecological success story – it's proof of what becomes possible when protecting nature is more valuable than destroying it.
Across the tropics, millions of families face the same impossible choice that our mother with the machete once faced. Meanwhile, the world needs to protect vast areas of forest to meet climate goals that will determine whether future generations inherit a livable planet.
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