16. Cameroon’s Sustainable Forest Management Initiatives with Potentials for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Climate change is one of the current global environmental challenges of great concern to the international community. Developing countries such as Cameroon will likely suffer most from its impacts partly because of high dependence on climate-sensitive natural resources such as forests and limited capacity to adapt to the changing climate. Cameroon’s forest ecosystem supplies goods and services for local livelihoods and national development. As climate change will have an undesirable impact on the functioning of the forest ecosystem, the livelihoods of the people that depend on it become inevitably vulnerable. Conservation and Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) for climate change mitigation and adaptation is one of the main responses to this challenge worth examining. Cameroon has taken some conservation and SFM initiatives that could potentially contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Based primarily on thorough review and analysis of policy and law documents as well as relevant literature, this chapter presents Cameroon’s forest sector conservation and management initiatives, especially efforts to practice SFM and the potentials of these initiatives to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. It identifies the problems often encountered in practicing SFM beneficial for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and proffers recommendations for improvement.