A Nigerian scientist’s “personal experience” with a wildfire, its threat to endangered bats she discovered just days before, and her campaign to protect them, has won her the global Goldman Environmental Prize.

Found in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary in south-eastern Nigeria, Iroro Tanshi said seeing the short-tailed roundleaf bat for the first time in almost 50 years, should have been "big headliner news”.

But there was a “serious situation… wildfires”, she told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast.

In a country where bats are often associated with witchcraft, Tanshi successfully launched a community-led campaign to protect them by preventing wildfires in the areas where they live.

Speaking of how she changed local perceptions of bats, the ecologist said: “It’s really the question of: ‘How do we convince people to protect the habitat?’

“In our case, it was because the wildfire problem was also a community problem – that was the hook.”

Tanshi – who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, in the US with a focus on bats – had identified human-induced wildfires as one of the threats faced by the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bats.

She told Focus on Africa that her team suspects the fire that triggered her campaign was started by a farmer trying to clear land near the forest.

“That fire burned for about three weeks until the rain came. There was nothing people could do – we just kept watching it every day,” she said, explaining that people work with them because they “just want to deal with the problem of wildfires on their farms as well”.

Tanshi and her community fire brigades have prevented serious wildfires from breaking out in and around the 24,700-acre Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary between 2022 and May 2025, according to the global Goldman Environmental Prize.

As well as educating local people on wildfires and prevention, the campaign also works to inform people about the importance of bats in nature.

In Nigeria, bats are commonly associated with witchcraft and are feared, but she and her team engages with the community through “multiple forms of media” with a particular focus on children.

“We don’t shy away from those conversations,” Tanshi said, explaining that bats contribute to their ecosystems, such as by dispersing seeds and pollinating plants.

“Your shea butter that a lot of people use – either raw or in cosmetic products around the world – is because of bats, which disperse the seeds of the tree,” she said.

“So essentially, you come to see that they play so many critical roles, it’s almost impossible to ignore them.”

Tanshi called it an “incredible honour” to win the award.

“There are very few things in this world that signal to you that the work that you’re doing has global relevance than things like this.”

She is one of six winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize. For the first time in its 37-year history, all the winners are female. (BBC)

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