lee white, welcome to hardtalk. temperatures still made the mid—20s hello. celsius across the south—east of the country on wednesday, you first went to gabon but as these weather fronts move parliament for nearly five weeks as a research zoologist, through, they've introduced much in the run—up to brexit. fresher conditions off the atlantic. critics say it'll help borisjohnson a young student. it's low pressure now in charge force through a no deal brexit. you became a conservationist, of the weather as we head the government says it's a standard on into the end of the week. an environmental campaigner and yet procedure that will still leave time here we sit with you as in fact, there'll be a fair amount for mps to debate brexit. a government minister, a suspected arson attack minister for the of rain in the forecast for some northern and western areas. on a nightclub in mexico has killed at least 25 people and environment in gabon. left 11 badly injured. fire bombs were thrown at the club how did you get seduced, in the city of kwatsa kwalkoss. federal authorities say if i may use that word, they are investigating possible into the murky world of politics? collusion between local officials thursday is looking fairly unsettled again across scotland and northern ireland thanks to this conservation is about people, area of low pressure. it's going to be pretty windy here — and organised crime. not about wildlife, really. gusts 30—a0mph in exposure. few showers or barely any showers the further south and east you go, tropical storm dorian has brought if people aren't involved, and again, a fairly warm heavy rains and strong winds afternoon with temperatures leave the gorillas and elephants reaching the mid—20s celsius. to the us virgin islands. the storm's been updgraded to look after themselves to a categoryi hurricane. and they'll be just fine. florida has declared a state leave the forests to grow of emergency as forecasters warn it could be a major hurricane and they'll be fine as well. by the time it makes landfall on sunday or monday. in a planet where people closer to the mid—to—high are churning out carbon dioxide teens further north. and the amazon is starting to burn as we move through thursday night and poachers are coming it's going to remain windy across north—western areas. in and decimating wildlife, further cloud and outbreaks of rain it's dealing with people that's piling into scotland the difficult part of conservation and northern ireland. a few showers into the north—west of england. tending to stay dry across the south—east. but it'll be a cooler

night for all of us, now on bbc news. and dealing with people is politics. and temperatures ranging it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. between 11—14 degrees. 0n into friday, low pressure to the north of the uk. a conveyor belt of cloud and rain streaming in off the atlantic but i'm just guessing will bring quite a lot of rainfall welcome to hardtalk. with your background as a zoologist, i'm stephen sackur. a man who spent a lot in fact to parts of the north and the west of the uk, our planet is haemorrhaging natural of time out in the field, particularly across west resources at an alarming rate. in nature, often pristine nature, and south—west scotland, biodiversity is under threat into northern ireland. as forests are felled, i'm guessing that perhaps you didn't rainfall totals really wild animals illegally hunted. actually like dealing mounting up here. but further south and east, again, with people that much. yes, i started as a closer to the high pressure over anti—social biologist. the near continent then, in my first five years it should tend to stay in gabon i barely came out dry with sunny spells, and again, feeling quite warm — my guest today is on the frontline of the forest so i 2a, 25 degrees. barely met anybody. over the years i went the mid—to—high teens of the effort to conserve again further north. and protect what remains. from being a zoologist to botanist now, into the weekend, lee white is the newly—appointed to archaeologist, that it remains fairly unsettled, environment minister started bringing me a bit with further wind and in the west african state of gabon. more towards people. certainly some rain around. and then it will turn even cooler as we head on into part two of the weekend, as we see winds a country famed for its tropical switch to a north—westerly forests, its elephants and gorillas. direction. but also notorious for systemic so, as we move out of friday corruption and inequality. and into saturday, this next feature so can gabon find a sustainable will bring quite a lot of rainfall balance between the needs 00:01:42,283 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 of man and nature? again to northern and western areas. and then at a point there by this point, we could be looking was a choice, do i keep on studying at a few issues across south—west the forests and the wildlife scotland, for dumfries and galloway, whilst they disappear? maybe four inches of rain falling or do i move in to a much more by the time saturday's out. active conservation role? you felt it was as urgent as that? but this rain band will pivot round, pushing to western england, parts of wales, sunshine

absolutely, yeah. and showers follow on behind. if you look at the way the planet but it still stays dry and fairly is going and the way africa's warm across the far south—east — wildlife is going, it's a crisis. 20—211 degrees. and some people do manage something cooler pushing into the north—west. but as that front clears just to keep studying. through during saturday night, but i couldn't do that. then it opens the floodgates to a polar maritime north—westerly, and that'll be very noticeable right up and down the country. a lot of people won't know gabon. so a much fresher start to the day. it's a relatively small country in terms of population. i know it's very sizeable, but it's fewer than 2 million people plenty of sunshine and showers on the atlantic coast of africa. across northern and western areas. a few heavy, maybe thundery ones mixed in. again it could be the south and east why gabon for you? that stays dry in the sunshine, you'd had no connection there. but temperatures will struggle — as a biologist, i was looking ranging from 12 to 17 or 18 degrees. for the place where i would see the gorillas and the elephants and the chimpanzees and wildlife, something like it would've been like before humans had high—powered rifles and started eliminating everything. and so it really was random drift in a way, i decided to do a phd, i wrote to all of the eminent scientists around the world who were studying how forestry impacts wildlife which is the subject i decided to study, and i got one letter back and it was from a british woman,

called caroline chuton, who had been in gabon for about ten years. the railway had opened up the rainforests of central gabon to forestry and caroline wrote back to me and said, "come along, we really need to understand what the impact of this increased pressure on the forest is going to have." by 2009, a decade ago, you had been appointed to be the chief, the boss, of the gabon national parks agency. a very, very sizeable operation. because i think there are, what, 13 national parks in gabon. something like two—thirds or more of the country is covered in forest. so you've got a big territory... it was a big job, yeah. you've already talked about the pressures, the balance between man and nature. how, in thatjob, did you preserve the forest, given that one of the key industries in gabon is derived from logging and timber trade?

you have to go back a little bit in the story. in 2002, i met 0mar bongo who had been president of the country for a long time. was president of the country for over a0 years. yes. and we could call him if, i don't know if you'd quarrel with us, but an african dictator. i would quarrel with that. i would call him an african chief, myself. dictator is a very hard and a very negative word. he was the president in a one—party system for 20 years and then he was the president welcome to bbc news, in a multi—party system i'm mike embley. with elections and he won our top stories: the elections and when he died, i was actually in a climate change negotiation in bonn when he died and i headed back to gabon. borisjohnson's suspension of parliament sparks protests and condemnation. opponents of a no—deal brexit are calling the prime minister's when i got back to gabon, move a constitutional outrage. the queue to pay respects in front of his coffin went three times around the presidential palace and they'd had to open the gates upgraded to a category1 hurricane, because theyjust couldn't deal storm dorian hits the us with the numbers of people. so i think dictator is unfair. virgin islands as it heads for the mainland. at least 20 people are killed in a firebomb attack on a nightclub in mexico. several more are seriously hurt.

we'll revisit your relationship climate activist greta thunberg with the ruling family later, arrives in new york, because it is important because it's after 15 days crossing the atlantic under sail, to minimise carbon emissions. politics and you are now a senior and important minister in the gabonese government, so we'll come back to politics because, of course, the bongo family still rules gabon through the son of omar bongo, ali bongo. but ijust want to come back first of all to forestry. because it seems to me it's a very important test case of what you have tried to achieve in your career. so explain to me, given we know that gabon is systematically corrupt, there is endemic corruption in gabon, and we know that illegal

logging is a lucrative business, how you as director of national parks, tried to fight that. when 0mar bongo created the parks system, there was forestry in all of the protected areas of gabon. and gabon was going the way of ivory coast. ivory coast today has 3% of its forests left. 80% of its parks have been deforested. and when we showed 0mar bongo beautiful national geographic photographs of the natural treasures of gabon, something clicked. a spark, a catalyst went off. and within a couple of months we'd created 13 national parks, preserving some of the most beautiful and the richest parts of gabon. jacques chirac, who was president of france at the time, came and tried to convince 0mar bongo that it was a bad decision.

the french had big logging interests in gabon. and the biggest critics of the parks were the foresters. when ali bongo 0ndimba became president, the first thing he did was to ban the export of raw timber, of unprocessed timber, and within two months president sarkozy was in gabon trying to convince him he had made the wrong mistake and that is was a silly thing to do. what 0mar bongo did was try to shift the paradigm of development in africa. britain, china, the us, have all been developed on cheap, raw materials from africa. and if we're going to develop african countries, if we're going to find the balance between the preservation and the sustainable use of these natural resources, at least a good proportion of the wealth that comes from the exploitation of those natural resources has to come back into africa.

and so the reason that, i guess, that i'm a government minister as well as a conservationist today is to find that balance, you can't do conservation in isolation, you are part of a system. but to come back to my point about how prepared you are to take on vested interests which are undermining the efforts you and others have made in the country to preserve and protect, i'm very mindful, for example, that here you sit as environment minister, your predecessor was sacked because of a scandal involving the illegal cutting down and trading of precious timber to the tune of some say hundreds of millions of dollars. some of this timber was found in containers inside gabon. the vice president ended up losing hisjob over this.

your predecessor, the environment minister. so i'm suggesting to you that your job is going to involve you taking on some very powerful vested interests. i've been doing that for years in gabon. i've been fighting the illegal ivory trade, where you're dealing with even terrorists groups. i've been fighting illegalforestry. we've only had two cases of illegal forestry inside the national parks of gabon in the last decade. i've been fighting illegal gold. between those three illegal industries, i was dealing with maybe $300—400 million of turnover and some very unpleasant organisations and people. and we managed to do it. one of the reasons we managed to do that is because i had very strong support from the president himself. but the question, partly, is whether you've been successful. i should say, the two politicians you have always denied their involvement in this wood scandal,

but nevertheless they lost their jobs. but it goes beyond wood. it involves the trading of ivory because people may know that gabon has one of the most important populations of forest elephants in the world. gabon has 10% of africa's forests and today, tragically, we have 60% of the forest elephants because they've disappeared everywhere else. but my point, i guess, is despite your best efforts, and you've just outlined how committed you were to protection, i'm looking at figures here. according to the data i've seen from reputed scientists, in the 1980s, gabon had between 60,000 and 65,000 forest elephants. today it's believe to have perhaps 25,000 or fewer. so it has lost most of its forest elephants. today we have about 45,000. really? we don't like to give that figure very often because we think it might attract the poachers, actually.

but even if you take the optimistic figure, you have lost what, say 20,000? it's not an optimistic figure. i'm a scientist, you know, at the base. i'm one of the world experts on forest elephants. well, then i will take yourfigure... if you have a look at any of the publications, we certainly do have, we have 60% of the 90,000, 95,000 forest elephants that are surviving. we lost 25,000 forest elephants in a gabon between 2006 and about 2012, 13—14. it was — we think it could be directly related to the cites decision in 2006 to allow illegal trade of ivory. and there's a very big debate going on right now at cites as to whether or not we should once again allow countries to sell ivory. and that sent a signal to the poachers and poaching just... actually poaching and with the gold price going up around the world

almost exponentially, ivory and gold, kind of, exploiters moved into the forests of gabon and the government wasn't ready. that was a failure. it was a failure for the gabonese government and for the conservation community. the government didn't have a national park service at that point and all the conservation money was going to international ngos. and we all failed, collectively. i see your response was interesting. you decided, in essence, to declare this a war. i mean, you exponentially increased the number of park rangers, you gave some of them weapons, you talked about a bloody conflict with the poachers. you said, "we have become paramilitary. we've had to turn biologists into soldiers, policemen, and spies.

i've gone from professor white, the scientist, to being a sworn in police officer." yeah, i never thought that was going to be my path in life, but... but is it working, that's the question, is it working? those elephants are still there. those parks are intact. and we're moving out of the parks, creating good governance of natural resources outside of the parks. there's this strong motivation to establish natural resource governance. we're realising, everyone, that if we don't get it right we're going to end up like central african republic, for example, where 35 years ago car was a tropical paradise like gabon, and then the poachers moved in from the north, from chad, sudan. they killed the rhinos and then they killed the elephants and they killed the big game and then they killed the small game and they became

bandits, robbers, rebels. there's a very clear link between natural resource governance in africa and peace and security. and so... and clean governance, too. exactly, yeah. if you plot a graph of elephant numbers against some measure of good governance or low corruption, you get almost a straight line. what about two other things that you have specifically said you believe can be helpful. one is more tourism. you've sort of blown the trumpet for getting more visitors into gabon, which, again, might seem counter—intuitive to a commitment to protection and conservation, and, secondly, palm oil. you seem to be a big fan of expanding palm oil operations in gabon. we need to develop our country. we have a raising population. we're a country that has been, for a long time, living on an oil—based economy. and, as you see the amazon forests burning on the news,

you realise that there isn't a future for oil—based economies with climate change. and so gabon has to diversify its economy. oil palm is just a fact of life. it is the most productive oil—producing plant that you can grow in the tropics. but it does suck up, as we've seen in countries like indonesia, last tracts of virgin forest. it comes down to management. where do you do oil palm? do you do oil palm in degraded areas, in savannah areas? or do you do it in pristine rainforest. in gabon we have a national plan that only allows oil palm in the most degraded habitats. and more tourists, with more roads, more flights coming in, all of the infrastructure that comes with hotels and everything connected with the leisure and tourism business, that's all good, is it, for these protected areas? again, it's a matter of management. if you look at botswana,

where people tend to fly, rather than drive, and you do high end, low throughput tourism, when you are giving people quality jobs, then tourism is a positive thing for natural resource governments. if you don't control it, if you let it get out of hand, as anything, whether it's agricultural, forestry, whatever... well, that's interesting. what you keep coming back to is the need for responsible governance, for clever and responsible government. why should we believe, even though you have nowjoined the government, that gabon is capable of that sort of governance, given that, right now, the president, your boss, is, according to many in your own country, incapable of fulfilling his job. we believe he had a stroke late last year. he's rarely seen in public. you're one of the last people seem pictured with him in public. so let's get your view. it is president ali bongo fit to govern your country?

he is. he's weakened by his stroke. he is walking like an old man, if you saw the images of him at the independence day. mentally he's... i would say, it's actually interesting. mentally, the french side of his brain is 100%. he's lost a little bit of his english. so he's totally fluent and with it in french, but his english has suffered slightly. so he's... he's definitely there and he's definitely in charge. so no question for you, he's fit to govern? he's fit to govern, yes. even in the deeper sense of a man who has been accused by, again, many people in his own country and many outside of being part of a kleptocratic regime, going back to his father, who governed for more than a0 years, we know from the french

investigation that the family have vast assets stored away abroad, much of it in paris and in france, including a whole fleet of luxury vehicles, the us senate reported on the movement of $100 million in what they regarded as suspect transactions, you're happy to sit in that government? i'm proud, actually, to be a government minister in gabon. i think what we're trying to do in gabon is to create a new vision for africa... but do you — do you sit and think about this sort of details i have just mentioned in the nature of the... of course i do. but you're presenting it in a very biased way. you're citing that small proportion of 100% negative opposition politicians who always portray these things... well, no, i'm actually citing french authorities and the us authorities, and the world bank, which points out that despite its being a major oil

producer, at least a third of the gabonese people live in poverty today. there is massive inequality in that country. there is. and ijust wonder when you sit in the government whether you think that you can deliver what you want to deliver given the climate in which you have to operate. i've been working in gabon for over 30 years. i've been gabonese for about 15 years. i've been through some quite tough negotiations over time and i've dealt with some very difficult situations. and i've come through that. in a system where we genuinely are trying to get it right, in a system where we really do have

these national parks which are well—managed, where we have more and more forestry concessions, which are well—managed and certified, where the economy is more and more balanced, in a system where i work for a, you portray him in a very negative way, but i work for a very remarkable president who is one of the most intelligent human beings i have ever met and has always supported me to do myjob. let me just ask you one last simple but perhaps very difficult question. if you want to do things which president ali bongo doesn't want you to do, there's only going to be one winner it won't be you. it's the nature of politics in that country. how far can you go push your commitment, do you think, before you run into trouble yourself? we'll see. i'm...

i like to think that i'm somebody who has integrity. that's why i have been put into... you called yourself incorruptible once. i suspect that may have been tested in gabon. i am not sure i would say that. but, ah, i have to be. i'm not sure i would say it myself, just because you never know in life where life is going to take you. but if we have a difference of opinion we'll talk about it. and if it is irreparable, and i feel that i can't continue in the government, then obviously i would leave the government. but knowing the man i work for, i don't see that happening. i didn't take the decision lightly, two months ago, to leave the national parks and become a minister, to become a white

politician in a black african country. i believe i can do a lot of good for the country, for its parks and wildlife, but more importantly, in a way, i'm the minister of forests, of the environment, as you said, of the oceans, and of climate change. and the difficult part of myjob, really, is the climate change