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They inhabit a polluted part of Ivory Coast’s main city with few jobs and a swelling population, but residents of Abidjan’s slums have a rare respite: a stretch of pristine rainforest.
From their wooden shacks and unpainted concrete houses beside motorways on the edge of Banco National Park, the millions who live in north Abidjan need no lesson on its worth.
“This forest is a great thing,” textile worker Sebastien Coulibaly, 35, said of the sky-scraping green mass of vines and broccoli-shaped trees.
“It helps us to breathe better; we live at ease because of it. Sometimes we walk our children there. We must protect it, because our planet will be nothing without forests.”
Logging, farming and armed conflict still threaten Africa’s jungles, which include the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest after the Amazon. But analysts are hopeful.
A new global study released this month by London’s Chatham House think-tank found that since 2002 illegal logging had decreased by about 50% in Cameroon, once one of the biggest sources of illicit timber, a decline of twice the global average.
The European Union this year signed deals with Ghana, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo to tighten restrictions on logging. An EU ban on illegally harvested timber was passed this month and is to take effect in 2012.
“We’ve dared to sanction firms, from withdrawing permits to big fines,” said Cameroon Forest Minister Elvis Ngolle.
Logging bans don’t directly address forest loss from other threats, such as agriculture, but officials are hoping that a potential money spinner carbon offsets will.
A United Nations plan (called REDD) to reduce emissions from deforestation or degradation has enabled Indonesia, which has the world’s third-largest forest but is being deforested by palm oil and timber firms, to get $1 billion from Norway in May to revoke those firms’ forestry licenses.
Deforestation makes up a fifth of global CO2 emissions and the REDD fund is worth $4 billion so far.
Unlike Asia, African states have been slow to capitalize on climate aid; they account for 2% of developing nation carbon projects. But many hope to change that.
An African Development Bank fund was established in 2008 for the Congo Basin, a forest of half a billion acres spanning nine countries and storing, the bank says, 25- to 30-billion tons of carbon, which currently trades at $18 per ton in Europe.
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