Iroro Tanshi: The Woman Who Saved a Sanctuary
In a quiet stretch of forest in southern Nigeria, something remarkable happened. A species thought to have been lost to time called the short-tailed roundleaf bat was rediscovered. What makes this story powerful is not about the animal. It’s about the woman who refused to let that rediscovery become a silent footnote. Meet Iroro Tanshi Africa’s winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2026, often called the “Green Nobel.” Iroro Tanshi is the kind of conservationist who studies wildlife in proximity to it. She shows up boots on the ground, listening to both the forest and the people who live beside it. As a conservation ecologist, her work took her into the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary , where she helped confirm the existence of a rare bat species once feared extinct. This news was only the beginning. She noticed something troubling. It was not about time or predators but it was fire. Human-caused wildfires were creeping into the sanctuary, threatening to erase not just ...