A stakeholder workshop took place over four days in Monrovia, Liberia, in December 2017, hosted by the Section on Great Apes of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group (SGA), Flora & Fauna International (FFI) and the Forestry De­velopment Authority of Liberia. Sixty-two participants, including representatives from governmental departments in the eight countries of the western chimpanzee’s range, conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations (CSOs), researchers and donor organisations, worked together to determine the actions needed to ensure the survival of western chimpanzees.

The methodology used to create this action plan was an adaptation of the Open Standards conservation-action-planning approach (OS). This method involves identifying conservation priorities (‘Conserva­tion Targets’) in a precise geographic area (‘Scope of the Project’), then assessing the target’s viability, and identifying threats to the targets. An assessment of the important stakeholders and the political and environmental context in which this action plan will be implemented was also undertaken. These analyses then led to the development of conservation strategies with precise, concrete and measurable objectives, as well as an implementation and monitoring plan.

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Conservation targets were defined by a technical committee in advance of the workshop. Participants at the workshop grouped conservation targets, defined the threats, and created conceptual models for each. The actions list­ed in the conceptual models were then grouped according to theme, to become region-wide strategies.

Workshop results were synthesised in a post-workshop meeting to reduce redundancy and merge them into a single outline from which a cohesive plan could be created. In its synthesis, the resulting plan deviates from standard OS meth­odology in that it broadens the conservation targets to encompass the entire range of the western chimpanzee, including all habitat types, and as such the needs of populations in all habitat contexts equitably, and thereby extending the scope of conservation actions to tackle the region-wide issues that threaten them. These threats and the measures detailed to deal with them are viewed solely at the subspecies’ level and provide the scaffold for future national and sub-national plans tailored to local contexts. Nonetheless, many actions needed for chimpanzee conservation should be defined at the national level, as threat intensity imperils chimpanzee populations differentially at different scales, and the scale of action varies according to the intervention.