By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Cameroon has notified UNESCO of plans to build a road in Lobéké National Park, part of the World Heritage listed Sangha Tri-National protected area.
The country’s Minister for Forestry and Wildlife says the road will help to secure the area against cross-border poachers and others engaged in criminal activities, but conservationists are concerned it could facilitate deforestation.
Cameroon’s minister of forestry and wildlife, Jules Doret Ndongo, will appear at a one-day conference focused on protecting the richly biodiverse forests of Central Africa. Yet his government’s policy and practice frequently threaten wildlife and the forests and livelihoods of local people in Cameroon and its regional neighbors, say conservationists.
According to Global Forest Watch, Cameroon lost 3.7% of its primary forest cover between 2002 and 2020 — in the Central Africa region, only Angola (5.3%) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.1%) lost more. Data for 2020 shows primary forest losses of 100,000 ha (247,000 acres), nearly double the previous year’s loss. Analyzing the most recent data, the World Resources Institute’s Mikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Goldman attribute much of this deforestation to activities of small-scale farmers in the south of the country.
In recent years, Cameroon’s government has granted concessions for logging, and oil palm and rubber plantations in its southern regions.
In 2020, it approved logging in one of the country’s largest remaining intact rainforests, the Ebo forest in the southwestern Littoral region, only to suspend the concessions after a public outcry.
Lobéké is part of a cross-border protected area that also includes the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic and the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
Together, they form the Sangha Tri-National, which was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list as a site of “outstanding universal value” in 2012.