00:02In the heart of Lagos, one of Africa's most densely populated, concrete-dominated megacities,
00:07lies a 78-hectare ecological sanctuary. This is the Lerke Conservation Centre,
00:16serving as a vital green lung against aggressive urban expansion.
00:22What I'm really proud of is the maintenance, because I think that in Nigeria,
00:27maintenance is very lack in a lot of things, so I think we should try to maintain more things like
00:35this.
00:36Personally, I'm very happy to see this place, because in a city, in a chaotic and big city like Lagos,
00:46things like that, places like this, where you can see the truly nature, where the nature is pure and
00:54original, are very important to understand the country.
01:00Established in 1990 by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, the site preserves coastal wetlands
01:07that once covered the region, but surrounding real estate expansion has altered the landscape.
01:17One of the major challenges is the engulfments by human activities. If you look around all the
01:26centres, there are residential areas, and you hardly can have your buildings around without a sand filling.
01:34So at the moment, we are having a pool of water gathering within the centre, which is of course causing
01:43damage to some of our facilities, even including the trees.
01:51To engage urban dwellers, the centre built Africa's longest suspended canopy walkway,
01:57a 401-metre path elevated 22 meters high.
02:08It's designed in such a way that it will give you access into the four layers in the forest,
02:12the forest floor, the understory, the canopy, and the emergent. The emergent is where you go above the
02:16forest cover. You'll be operating at the emergent layer.
02:21As African cities urbanize at unprecedented rates, this urban reserve offers a blueprint for how nature and
02:30megacities can co-exists.
