In the Congo Basin, a road cuts through once-untouched ape wilderness

Balancing development and conservation

According to conservation workers, the success of the TRIDOM initiative will depend not only on the ability of the region’s governments to manage protected areas, but also on how well they control the exploitation of unprotected parts of the landscape.

“Inasmuch as this area has a high conservation potential, it also has a huge economic potential for both countries,” Halleson says. “The question is, ‘how will this economic potential be reconciled with the conservation potential?’”

The answer starts with recognizing that conservation cannot succeed if it does not take into account social and economic interests, Etoga says.

“We know that we cannot have protected areas everywhere,” he says. “This [the southeast of Cameroon] is 5 million hectares. We cannot have 5 million hectares of protected area. First, we need to acknowledge other sectorial needs.”

There have already been some achievements, he says: “The first success is that we have five protected areas [in Cameroon alone], and those protected areas are no-go zones for other sectorial users. Everyone knows that you cannot have mining, logging and other activities other than conservation inside the Dja Reserve.”

The next stage, Halleson says, will be to negotiate what kinds of activities will be allowed in unprotected areas, and how those activities will be carried out. “We have best practices for logging concessions, best practices for mining and agriculture. This is what we want to have.”

Cameroon’s Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development is now leading a land-use planning initiative in the area that aims to satisfy the competing interests of conservation, timber exploration, mining, agriculture and dam building. NGOs like WWF provide advisory services, pointing out parts of the forest with high conservation value.

“We have a bi-monitoring team on the field,” Etoga says. “They are collecting data from where elephants have corridors, where the biodiversity hotspots are, the clearings where wildlife go for feeding and drinking. If the ministry does not have that data, they would not be able to identify those places as hotspots.”

Ray of hope

WWF and other stakeholders are also negotiating with community members like Ondoua so that they can limit their impact on the landscape and its wildlife. Community and municipal forestry schemes allow inhabitants to benefit from forest resources without resorting to unsustainable exploitation, by earning royalties or harvesting non-timber forest products.

As the sun slowly burns its way through the moist air, Ondoua decides not to head into the forest, where he cultivates plantains, cassavas and an assortment of food crops. Instead, he keeps talking about the road: traveling is already smoother and supplies now arrive from the city much more quickly and cheaply.

“This is the best thing that has happened to us,” he says. “They say we should not cut the forest. Now with this road, we can do other things — like send our children to school and find jobs in the city.”

Banner Image: A timber truck drives through a freshly dug section of the new highway, which used to be a narrow track, in early February. Image by Eugene N. Nforngwa for Mongabay.

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