Adrian Pennink will introduce a feature documentary film, two years in the making, about protecting Gabon’s precious rainforest. Gabon’s rainforest makes up a sizeable chunk of the second largest rainforest on earth – the Congo Basin. Without the rainfall it produces, much of Africa’s Sahel would be uninhabitable. This film tells the extraordinary story of a Mancunian biologist who travelled to Gabon to do his PhD thesis and ended up as the Environment Minister in President Ali Bongo’s cabinet. His job: to protect the forest and its multitude of rare and endangered species against illegal logging by Chinese timber cartels and the many thousands of illegal gold miners and ivory poachers who cross into Gabon from the Congo…..while at the same time trying establish the forest as the basis for an environmentally sustainable economy.

This talk will be given in the pub and not recorded.