FAO’s new €6m project to monitor forests in 10 African nations

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has announced a new €6 million regional initiative that will help ten Central African countries to set up advanced national forest monitoring systems.

The ten countries are part of the Congo Basin and include Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Rwanda and São Tomé and Principe.

The forestry project will be managed jointly by the Central Africa Forests Commission (COMIFAC) and the FAO in close collaboration with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

The FAO, in a statement, said it will provide technical support to the countries enabling them to use remote sensing technologies to estimate forest cover and forest cover changes as well as to estimate the amount of carbon stocks contained in forests in the region.

The project will also assist countries in preparing funding proposals for creating reliable and sustainable forest monitoring systems for each country, as part of the REDD+ initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries).

It will also help strengthen regional cooperation and experience sharing, the UN food agency indicated.

“Learning from Brazil, the national forest monitoring system is the key element to pave the road for substantive international support to protect forests and promote sustainable forest management,” said Eduardo Rojas, Assistant Director-General of the FAO Forestry Department.

The forests of Africa’s Congo Basin, approximately 200 million hectares, are one of the world’s largest primary rainforests, second only to the Amazon. The region’s forests support the livelihoods of some 60 million people.

According to COMIFAC, the gross deforestation annual rate in the Congo Basin was 0.13% between 1990 and 2000 and it doubled in the period of 2000-2005.

By Ekow Quandzie