Cameroon Addresses Climate Change

Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. (Cameroon News) – Cameroon councils band together to combat climate change as more and more episodes of bad weather are making it impossible for farm produce to get to the markets.

Local councils in Cameroon are gearing together to make use of every possible opportunity to battle against climate change. In fact the latest venture is to get a network in place to ramp up participation at the grass roots level and increase government responsibility on climate policy.

The Cameroon Councils Against Climate Change Network aspires to provide Cameroon’s councils a unified voice in influential decisions about the environment in which they also hold stakes, according to Marie Ahidjo, mayor of Garoua 11 council and the network’s first president.

Earlier, “decisions taken by the government to fight against climate change did not take into consideration the environmental realities of the different council areas and the ignorance of the mostly illiterate farming population in the local communities, (and) thus did not yield the expected results,” Ahidjo said.

In many such decisions taken, she said, the government has not taken enough care to provide for environmental democracy such as availability of data, public participation and access to justice.

The secretary-general of Cameroon’s Ministry of the Environment, Patrick Akwa, has lauded the setting up of the network at an instance when the government is in the process of decentralizing activities.

Akwa said that the network will not just empower local councils to share information, ideas and expertise but will give them the additional power of forcing the government to make decisions on climate change while keeping in mind the local sentiments and needs.

“The government is ready to work in tandem with the local communities and provide them the necessary technical and material support,” he said.

The latest idea of setting up a network was taken from a climate change sensitization road show arranged by the British High Commission to Cameroon in August 2010.

The program had been to a number of local councils in areas where the impact of climate change has been drastic.

The network is aided by the British High Commission and the Washington-based Bioresources Development Conservation Programme (BDCP) as part of an program to deploy better environmental governance and to battle more effectively against climate change.

“This network will permit the different local councils to better communicate and exchange accurate climate data,” said local BDCP coordinator Emmanuel Nganshi.

He emphasized that it is imperative that the local councils participate in the decisions that involve environment management so as to make sure that the results are better than what is being expected.

Most of the local councils are especially bothered about the effects that global climate changes could have on farming. Most of these areas primarily depend on agriculture and farming for their livelihood, but agriculture contributes to just 31 percent to the country’s GDP which is a sharp decline from more than 70 percent in the 1980s , according to statistics from the Ministry of Environment.

Environmental experts have however also seen a similar trend in other countries in the region as well.

“Water supply variability, soil degradation (and) recurring droughts have been experienced in the northern parts of Cameroon as well as in countries like Chad, Niger, northern Nigeria and Mali,” said Zachee Nzohngandembou, coordinator of the Center for the Environment and Rural Transformation, an environmental non-profit based in Limbe.

Climate change and other environmental problems have taken out large factions of marginal agriculture out of production, thereby making poverty and hunger common problems which in turn have caused innumerable conflict and civil strife such as those in Cameroon in February 2008 and northern Nigeria in 2010, he said.

Network members are now discussing on ways and means to deploy their united strength to attract investments from development partners for climate-oriented projects.

“We will come up with some projects that will permit us [to] fight the effects of climate change, like tree planting, water catchment building, good drainage systems (and) construction of all-season roads,” said Clement Wanki Atanga, mayor of Nkambe council.

The Limbe 1, Nkambe, Garoua 11, Santa, Nanga-Eboko, Idenau, Kaele and Kribi councils are the first set of members of the network, and the network is confident of roping in more councils’ as it grows and spreads out.

Daniel Matute, mayor of the coastal Limbe 1 council, is already optimistic of a bright future.

“We are planning to bring in all the different local councils in the ten regions of the country, because this network will play a great role in the fight against the abuse of the environment,” he said. The network’s creation, he said, “will greatly motivate us (to) continuously sensitize the population on the need for good environmental practices.”