This summary suggests that past conservation efforts in the country have been guided by the following tenets:

• Check environmental degradation due to shifting cultivation;
• Control water supplies through reforestation;
• Realize economic benefits from reforestation with economic crops (gum copal, timber, and others).

Within this paradigm, the promotion of conservation for purposes of preservation of biodiversity, education, and promoting tourism as alternative means of deriving national social and economic benefits were a leitmotiv, if they were a consideration at all. A number of traits in the implementation of adopted conservation policies underscore these observations.

• An organizational structure that has remained essentially unchanged over the years was adopted for the Forestry Division; it established administrative and monitoring functions that operate from the top-down.
• Intrinsically, conservation was effected by government through enforcement.
• Forest conservation by government was primarily in the hands of experts, in most cases strangers to the locality, appointed by central government with little or no involvement from local communities.
• Reserves have been identified without proper inventorying of biodiversity.
• Conservation efforts have been and remain underfunded.
• Biodiversity conservation education has not received the emphasis it deserves, nationally or locally.
• The value of conservation was defined primarily in terms of current market value of assets that had not been adequately inventoried.

Against this background, threats to the integrity of the reserves always existed. Since benefits from reserves went to government and were not shared with local residents, "illegal" extraction of resources occurred.

When natural resources with a higher market value that more people could exploit, such as diamonds, were discovered the integrity of reserves yielded to this new potential source of wealth. (This challenge to the integrity of biodiversity in the face of newly discovered natural resources extend to rutile, bauxite, and gold mining as well.) The civil war in the country has exacerbated these trends. Diamond and gold mining, lumbering, hunting, and firewood collection in reserves became rampant in an atmosphere of disregard for law and order.

The top-down approach to enforcement of conservation policies has not facilitated the task of conservation. Local communities were required to surrender their lands to the government for conservation purposes; and they had no additional input to the process or benefit from it. Encroachments for agricultural purposes, hunting, illicit mining, timber, and firewood were therefore commonplace.

Disregard for the integrity of reserves has also been fueled, to a lesser extent, by ignorance about the value of biodiversity conservation nationwide. Ten forest reserves were proposed in 1913 after legislation of Forest Ordinances. In 1987, the government accepted Phillipson's recommendations for 18 key areas to provide a network of conservation areas to preserve flora and fauna. The recommendation was later modified to include additional areas. These sites are at various stages of the legislative process as well as development of reserves. It is noteworthy that apart from references to unpublished studies on these reserves, there appears to be little or no documentation of inventories of the various reserves. Perhaps as a result of this lapse, educational programs on the national and international value of biodiversity in reserves has not begun and tourism programs have yet to be put in place as an alternative national income generating activity. In a civil war situation, these latter activities have not been possible.

The government has always been the major player in conservation efforts in the country. Over the years, as governments became hard pressed to effectively discharge their primary role of governance, financial allocations for most other activities suffered. Conservation was no exception. Inadequacy of funding appears to have always characterized conservation efforts in the country and probably accounts for the dearth of detailed scientific studies on Sierra Leone's biodiversity.

As government fails to discharge aspects of its responsibilities, NGOs stepped in, often on humanitarian grounds. In a civil war milieu of competing demands, conservation has suffered. International NGOs with higher funding levels have tended to shy away from conservation, leaving the bulk of the work in this area to underfunded local NGOs. Most of the local conservation NGOs became un-funded when rebels overran their operational areas. Their major sponsors withheld sponsorship or allocated more of their assistance to relief and resettlement. Conservation NGOs resorted to "target chasing." In a bid to stay functional on a reduced scale, organizations whose operational bases upcountry had been overrun by rebels would collaborate with other agencies in safe areas. A common practice has been the increased number of organizations that collaborated to plant trees on the mountain ranges of the peninsula, which had been subjected to severe encroachments during the war years. Some NGOs continued in conservation only indirectly by undertaking environmentally friendly agriculture, alternative income generating activities, and development of fuel-saving cooking devices.

This discussion highlights only some key challenges to conservation in a postwar Sierra Leone.